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The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:41:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Sabato: Say, 2018 looks like a looming disaster for Senate Democratshttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/12/08/sabato-say-2018-looks-like-a-looming-disaster-for-senate-democrats/
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 01:41:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3935089Democrats blew a golden opportunity to win back control of the Senate in 2016. Republicans defended 23 seats against the Democrats’ 13, and were widely expected to suffer significant losses — more than the four seats necessary to reduce the Senate to a tie. Instead, the GOP held on in Florida, Pennsylvania, and handily won a Wisconsin race that almost everyone expected Russ Feingold to win by a large margin. If the GOP wins the run-off race in Louisiana as expected, they’ll have a 52-48 majority for the next two years — and maybe wider, if Heidi Heitkamp gets a position in the Donald Trump administration.

By 2019, that might become a filibuster-proof majority, warns Larry Sabato. Rather than the 10-seat advantage they had in 2016, Democrats will have a seventeen-seat disadvantage. Furthermore, many of those races will be in states won by Republicans in November:

Including the two independents who caucus with the Democrats, the party holds 25 of the Class I Senate seats that are up for election in 2018, while the Republicans hold only eight. Again, a look back at the last few times this group of seats was contested explains the Democrats’ exposure. After Republicans netted eight seats on this map in the 1994 Republican Revolution (and party switches by Sens. Richard Shelby of Alabama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado from Democrat to Republican would essentially make it 10 by the time of Campbell’s switch in March 1995), Democrats made big gains in Class 1 in both 2000 (four) and 2006 (six). Going into 2012, it appeared that Democrats would lose seats, but they upset expectations and instead gained two, which is why they are so overextended now. …

The last time a party was as exposed as Democrats are in 2018 was in the 1970 cycle. At the end of 1968, 25 Democratic-held seats were up in the 1970 midterm. There are some similarities between the position of Democrats in 1970 and 2018. First, Class I Senate seats were up in 1970, just as they are in 2018. Second, a sizable number of Democratic-held 1970 Senate seats (13) were up in states that Republican Richard Nixon had just carried in the closely-contested 1968 presidential election, compared to the 10 Democrats are defending in 2018 in Trump states. Perhaps endangered Democrats up in 2018 can feel a little bolstered by the fact that Democrats only lost three net seats in the 1970 midterm despite having to defend numerous seats, many in states that backed the most recent GOP presidential nominee. Overall, 11 of the 12 Democratic incumbents running in states won by Nixon in 1968 won reelection in 1970 (though Harry Byrd Jr. of Virginia ran as an independent that cycle, eschewing his previous party label).

Democrats overcame their overextension in 1970 in part because Nixon held the presidency, while the overextended parties in 1926 and 1938 held the White House, perhaps contributing to their bigger losses. So as the Democrats assess their Senate odds in 2018, they can take some solace in the possibility that the midterm dynamic might help them protect their many vulnerable incumbents.

Can they actually take solace in that, however? Take a look at the map and see where the contests will take place:

Bear in mind that Democrats usually do better in presidential cycles than midterms, thanks to the dynamics of turnout, and one starts to sense the disaster Sabato sees looming. There is little chance of Democrats losing the deep-blue coastal states or Minnesota, especially with Amy Klobuchar defending her seat. After that, though, Democrats have a large number of seats that look at serious risk, including Indiana, Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin again, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and probably Florida. All of these states have Republican legislatures and went for Trump in this election. Picking up those eight bring Republicans up to 60, and that’s without considering what might happen in Virginia, West Virginia, and Maine — where Trump did stronger than expected and which is represented by an independent (Angus King) who caucuses with Democrats.

It’s entirely possible that Republicans could end up with a 62-63 seat majority, which would give them carte blanche on policy for the final two years of Trump’s first term. It’s also possible that some of this potential might dissipate as a reaction to Trump’s governance, as frequently happens in midterm elections. That would require Democrats to have learned the lessons of why they lost so badly in 2016 — and so far, as Salena Zito explains, they’re still in deep denial:

What is astounding, post-election, is the total lack of contrition Democrats have displayed for ignoring the workingman and -woman bloc that has been the party’s horn of plenty. The only regret they display is that they lost the election, not the voters.

What Democrats, academics and pundits keep refusing to see is that the loss was never about Trump’s candidacy; it was all about how Democrats have increasingly lost touch with their voters outside of coastal America — until those voters finally hit their breaking point.

“The Democratic Party has become a coastal elitist club and if there is any decision or discussion made to broaden that within the ranks it is squashed,” said Dane Strother, a legendary Washington, DC-based Democratic strategist.

“We have completely lost touch with Middle America,” he admits, “How did we go from the party of the little man to the party of the elite?” Then he answers; “Yes, we rightfully should protect the rights of minorities, African-Americans, Hispanics, the LBGTQ communities and we always should — but we can’t forget the rest of the country along the way,” he said.

They have less than two years to figure that out. So far, though, all they’ve done is kept their party’s leadership in the same hands that lost four straight election cycles and turned Democrats into that “coastal elitist club.” That portends yet another major electoral disaster for Democrats. And if Republicans and Trump actually deliver on their promises in 2017-18, it could be even worse than it looks for those coastal elites.

]]>3935089The twilight of Nancy Pelosi?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/26/the-twilight-of-nancy-pelosi/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/26/the-twilight-of-nancy-pelosi/#commentsMon, 26 Jan 2015 14:21:08 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3123702The national news media spent all of 2014 writing about the Republican civil war that never materialized. Even the one that did in 2015 to much attention from reporters and pundits — the stillborn rebellion against John Boehner — hardly delivered on the hype. Across the aisle, though, a more significant, and more overdue, rebellion against Nancy Pelosi may be percolating, Politico’s Lauren French and Anna Palmer report:

The California lawmaker is facing some of the most serious unrest she’s ever seen in her dozen years as the leader of the House Democrats: Members complain that the party has no message and no clear plan to retake the majority, despite good news on the economy that should have brought rewards at the polls. They also accuse senior lawmakers of failing to pull their weight in dues as they occupy coveted committee slots. …

In the past, Pelosi’s stature in the caucus tamped down any dissent. She outworked, out-hustled and outmaneuvered any potential rival, and her influence — bolstered by the millions she raises for House Democrats — is still unmatched. Even after November’s losses, the Democrats unanimously elected her to continue serving as minority leader.

“You heard the vote on the floor when we were trying to elect a speaker,” said California Rep. Xavier Becerra, the chairman of the Democratic Caucus. “I think it was pretty clear, as diverse a group as Democrats are, we are very united behind Nancy Pelosi.”

But she is not as unilaterally formidable as she once was. That was shown by her failure in November to get a key ally, California Rep. Anna Eshoo, elected to the top Democratic spot on the Energy and Commerce Committee and the failed attempt to force changes to the $1.1 trillion government spending bill that Republicans crafted in December.

The grumblings about Pelosi came almost immediately after the midterm elections, which the Democrats lost in spectacular fashion — the third loss in a row for House Democrats under Pelosi. Under her leadership, House Democrats have gone 2-4 in national elections starting in 2004. Last November, Pelosi argued, “I’m the one that brung everyone to the party by winning the House in the first place,” paralleling an old adage about loyalty. However, Pelosi largely lucked out in 2006 with Bush fatigue, and even more so in 2008. Ever since, the electorate keeps providing reminders to Democrats that they’re not happy with the sharp left turn under Pelosi, while Republicans are delighted to make her an issue in every cycle.

French and Palmer also note this as a problem. One unnamed member of Pelosi’s caucus says the need to bring up suburban issues has become “an evangelical mission” in the Democratic caucus retreats. Gerry Connolly told Politico that the caucus needs to have an open discussion on what went wrong in this midterm and the last one as well. That sends a rather pointed signal to Pelosi’s leadership, not just during the midterms but also legislatively as well. Some of this can be left on Barack Obama’s doorstep, but Pelosi has been a loyal water-carrier for Obama — and sometimes provides the push to move him farther to the Left and more out of synch with voters.

Becerra’s defense of unity behind Pelosi is more damning than commendatory. They have lost three cycles in a row, including one in which their party’s President won re-election, and House Democrats clearly have no Plan B in mind. Becerra and the majority of Democrats still left in the House seem content to keep marching off the progressive cliff under repeatedly failing leadership. Republicans may have their own significant issues, but it seems their best allies are across the aisle, positioning themselves to provide the GOP a generational majority.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/01/26/the-twilight-of-nancy-pelosi/feed/493123702Reid: ObamaCare rollout killed us, not the issueshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/10/reid-obamacare-rollout-killed-us-not-the-issues/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/10/reid-obamacare-rollout-killed-us-not-the-issues/#commentsWed, 10 Dec 2014 13:31:02 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2596576What lessons has Harry Reid learned from not one but two midterm wave elections that crushed his party and (finally) booted him into the Senate minority? Not much, it seems. Reid tells Jeremy Peters in a New York Times profile that the American people agree with Democrats on the issues, despite what the polls and two elections have made very clear to practically everyone else. If it hadn’t been for those darned kids at HHS, Reid would have gotten away with another election cycle, dagnabbit (via TWS):

Mr. Reid’s remarks, which he made in an interview from his suite just off the Senate chamber (the door outside will say “Office of the Majority Leader” for another few weeks), reflected a hardening sense within the Democratic Party that voters still supported its positions on issues like raising the minimum wage, college affordability and women’s rights. But Mr. Reid and his fellow Democrats also believe that they did a poor job of communicating their policies in a way that gave voters a reason to look past the deepening dysfunction in Washington.

He acknowledged that he thought Democrats had been in pretty good shape until just a few days before the election. “Things went south quickly,” he said. “But we always thought we had issues on our side.”

In hindsight, Mr. Reid said, it was easier to see how damaging the mismanaged rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges had been. “We never recovered from the rollout because the election became one that was directed toward the president. We couldn’t overcome that,” he said. Still, he added, “I should have seen it coming.”

The level of denial here is staggering, but not terribly surprising. The midterms had been running off the rails for Democrats for months, not just “a few days before the election.” True, some of the polling had a couple of races close, such as in Kansas and Georgia, but that turned out to be bad polling, not reality. There was no late-arising turnout surge that changed the dynamics of those elections — just the same ticked-off voters who turned out in 2010, too.

Blaming the massive defeat on the rollout would be akin to blaming the darkness for the Titanic’s sinking. Sure, it was a contributing factor, but the actual cause was steaming at full speed into an iceberg. Chuck Schumer at least grasped that much in his post-mortem a few days after the election (as did Tom Harkin, while missing the larger point). The rollout exposed the incompetence of the Obama administration, but the iceberg in this case was ObamaCare itself, which has always been unpopular with voters. Democrats seized their one moment of having unchallengeable control of Washington DC to shove that down voters’ throats rather than work on immigration or real economic and tax reforms that could have made the recovery something more than Stagnation Lite for five years.

Yeah, Reid should have seen it coming. Practically everyone else did. The only question was the extent of the wave, not the fact that Democrats were about to get buried.

As for the rest of the profile, Peters does a pretty good job of (unintentionally?) showing a politician long past his expiration date. Reid’s bitterness consumes him, and Peters eggs it on a bit himself in his description of a post-election mutiny within Reid’s caucus. He describes six Senate Democrats who refused to vote for Reid as “irascible,” which seems rather ironic after getting that far into the profile of Reid. The soon-to-be Minority Leader pledges to be obstructionist, sneers at the six who voted against him for the position, and in general doesn’t have a kind word for anyone but himself. Reid has collapsed into a caricature of petulance and selfishness, and it’s not clear that either he or Peters realizes it. He’s only a purloined bank deposit away from being Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/10/reid-obamacare-rollout-killed-us-not-the-issues/feed/652596576Open thread: Landrieu’s last stand in Louisiana; Update: AoSHQDD calls it for Cassidy; Update: AP calls it for Cassidyhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/06/open-thread-landrieus-last-stand-in-louisiana/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/06/open-thread-landrieus-last-stand-in-louisiana/#commentsSun, 07 Dec 2014 00:01:41 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2511618Polls opened this morning in Louisiana’s runoff race at 7 am and won’t close until 8 pm CT today, but there isn’t really much suspense in the final act of the midterms. By all indications, Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy will cruise to victory and send Mary Landrieu back home (in a manor of speaking, if you’ll pardon the pun). The final days of Landrieu’s Senate career have been marked with so much incoherence and backtracking that it’s still not clear whether she’ll even get to 40% today, even while deploying desperation tactics. That would be a mightily embarrassing tumble for a three-term incumbent, but not much of a surprise; even the media seems determined to bury Mary.

At least a few people still hold out hope. For instance, the Times-Picayune endorsed Landrieu today and made a more intelligible case for re-election than Landrieu has managed in months. Unfortunately, the case rests on a bill passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and two more recent minor bills that had only a moderate impact on her constituency:

Her Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which passed in 2006, achieved something Louisiana leaders had tried for decades to do: Require the federal government to give our state and other energy-producing states a significant share of revenues from offshore drilling. By 2017, the act will provide an estimated $500 million each year for restoring Louisiana’s coast. …

She played a key role in writing and passing the Restore Act, which will ensure that the vast majority of BP’s fines for the 2010 oil spill will go to coastal restoration — with Louisiana in line for the largest share. Her leadership and ability to work with Republican colleagues in other Gulf states was essential to the act’s approval.

She also wrote provisions into law allowing FEMA to forgive community disaster loans, which eliminated $391 million in post-Katrina debt for parish governments. In the past year, $54.8 million in loans for Jefferson Parish, $67.8 million for St. Tammany Parish schools and $24.4 million for the St. Tammany sheriff and parish government were wiped off the books thanks to her efforts.

At least that’s a rational case for Landrieu, if laughably weak. Instead of sticking with that kind of argument, though, Landrieu tried telling a Louisiana radio host that she voted for ObamaCare as a defenseagainst Obama. Landrieu tells Jeff Crouere that her vote was all that stood between Louisiana and a government-imposed single-payer system. In the process, she belittles Crouere’s education for not recognizing her superior intellect. The conversation started at 7:30 in the segment, most of which is captured in the YouTube:

L: I voted for the Affordable Care Act. I did not vote for Obama. I voted for the Affordable Care Act for Louisiana —

C: When the history books are written, they’re going to say ObamaCare in the first paragraph, Senator. You know that.

L: Jeff, Jeff — Where did you go to high school?

C: De La Salle.

L: Okay. The brothers at De La Salle would teach you to read. Do you know what his signature education, I mean signature health care plan was? It was single payer! Don’t you remember? The liberals in the Congress, including President Obama, the liberals wanted single payer.

C: Right.

L: You ever heard of that?

C: Yes, yes yes — [crosstalk]

L: Do you know what single payer means? Now you tell me, you tell me the truth. Did not President Obama want single payer? Yes or no? [crosstalk]

C: Ah, he did, he did, he did, I’m sure he did, yeah.

L: Did you know that I said no to single payer? That’s what President Obama wanted, Jeff!

C: But the Affordable Care act did — [crosstalk] What passed, Senator, was not wanted by the American people, was not wanted by the people of Louisiana, so again you did something we didn’t want.

After haggling over Crouere’s abilities as a host and his education at De La Salle, Landrieu returns to her pitch:

L: What was the President’s plan for health care? Was it sig — was it single payer, yes or no?

C: That was probably his dream.

L: Yes. And that was his proposal. That was Obama’s proposal. And you know what happened, Jeff? That’s what the liberals wanted. That’s what Obama wanted. They wanted single payer. And you are smart enough, and the brothers at Dr La Salle taught you well enough, to know that.

That’s almost clinically insane. Yes, we all knew that progressives wanted to push single payer — but they never proposed it. Landrieu is flat-out lying when she claims Obama proposed a single payer plan; in fact, Obama and the White House never actually put together a plan at all, a hands-off strategy that drew tons of criticism from progressives and conservatives alike. That became such an issue that the White House finally promised a plan would come soon in September 2009, but never actually materialized.

Single-payer was part of the discussion, but only dishonestly, and not for long. We knew that they wanted the public option as a stalking horse to get it — but that disappeared from the ACA months before the final version passed. Landrieu now wants to argue that the ACA was a defeat for Obama and the only way to stop single payer, when single payer had as much chance of passing Congress in 2010 as a repeal of the 16th Amendment will in the next two years.

Nor does the dishonesty end there. The AP hasn’t been impressed with her “mishmash of topics” in campaign messaging, either:

“It’s been very difficult because (Republicans) have been successful in a number of states by saying, ‘Obama bad, therefore vote against your own senator.’ And that’s what they’ve said here,” said Democratic former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux. “That shouldn’t be the issue in the race. It should be whether or not Mary’s done a good job for the state. I think she’s done incredible things for the state.”

But Landrieu has not stuck solely to that idea, throwing an assortment of messages at Louisiana voters as she tries to hang onto the last statewide Democratic-held seat in the Deep South. Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Kay Hagan of North Carolina went down in defeat Nov. 4 after being pummeled by similar Republican-driven, anti-Obama strategies. …

Meanwhile, Landrieu’s advertising — like her constantly-shifting talking points — is a mishmash of topics.

While she’s distanced herself from Obama in most appearances, Landrieu’s running ads on radio stations that cater to black listeners saying Republicans have disrespected the president and urging people to vote for Landrieu “so she can help our president continue to do the great job he is doing.”

A different radio spot from her campaign suggests the Senate race isn’t about the president at all, but should be about Landrieu’s record and her seniority: “We’re not voting for Obama. We’re voting for us and our future,” a woman says to her husband.

Remember that Landrieu claimed that Cassidy disrespected the President by referring to Obama by his last name instead of his title — and then re-read that transcript I provided above to see the hypocrisy. When Landrieu wants to distance herself from the President, he’s “Obama.” When she wants to curry favor among his dwindling supporters, he’s “our President.” Looks like Landrieu is suffering from a bad case of projection.

Speaking of projections, expect to see Landrieu put out of her misery early in the count. If the media doesn’t call this within the first 30 minutes after the polls close, either the entire state of Louisiana fell into a sinkhole or the media decided to take a late-evening nap.

Update, 8:07 CT: AoSHQ has already called it for Cassidy, and predicts … pain for Landrieu:

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/06/open-thread-landrieus-last-stand-in-louisiana/feed/4552511618New poll shows Landrieu closing gap in Louisiana — to, er, 24 pointshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/04/new-poll-shows-landrieu-closing-gap-in-louisiana-to-er-24-points/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/04/new-poll-shows-landrieu-closing-gap-in-louisiana-to-er-24-points/#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 13:31:12 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2479261With the runoff just two days away in Louisiana’s Senate race, the excitement of the final contest in the 2014 midterms is so thick one could cut it with a knife … at least on the GOP side. Since independent pollsters gave up on the finale of Mary Landrieu’s Senate career, Republican pollsters are the only ones taking surveys — or at least the only ones publishing the results. The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker takes a look at the latest results from WPA Opinion Research, working on behalf of the conservative group Independent Women’s Voice, and finds Bill Cassidy out in front of the incumbent by 24 points:

Cassidy led Landrieu 57 percent to 33 percent in the survey conducted Nov. 24-25 by WPA Opinion Research for Independent Women’s Voice. His victory would bring the number of Republican Senate seats captured in this year’s midterm elections to nine, topping off the new GOP majority at 54 seats. The poll of 500 likely voters had an error margin of 4.4 percentage points.

“Cassidy has the lead among all gender age groups and enjoys a [sizable] lead among independent voters,” WPA Opinion Research said in a memo.

“Moreover, based on current projections, even if African-Americans support Landrieu at 95% and turnout in record numbers, she will still lose on Election Day.”

The best that Landrieu can manage in the gender demos is a ten-point deficit among women 55 years of age and older. Cassidy gets 61% of women between 18-54 years of age to just 32% for Landrieu. The gap actually narrows slightly with men in the same age range, going 56/31 for Cassidy. Independent voters give Cassidy an astonishing 44-point lead, 67/23.

As noted, bear in mind that this is a Republican-leaning pollster. Normally analysts would treat results from partisan pollsters with a little skepticism, but in this race that’s all we’re seeing. According to the Real Clear Politics poll average (which does not yet include this poll), the closest survey to this was another Republican poll taken a week before Thanksgiving, which showed Cassidy up 26 points, 60/34, and a small local firm (JMC) taken at the same time that had Cassidy up 53/38. Rasmussen’s the only independent national pollster watching the race, and they came up with a 15-point Cassidy lead as well. The way Republican pollsters are seeing the race, a 15-point loss might be seen as a moral victory for Landrieu.

The way Democrats have behaved in this runoff also speaks volumes, the Washington Post reports today. They’re already blaming Landrieu for her campaign strategy while they cut her loose:

There remains the formality of a runoff election on Saturday — but as far as the national Democratic Party is concerned, three-term Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana is presumed dead. …

But national Democrats speak — not for attribution, of course— as though they have already left the field and headed for the locker room. Their dispirited donors, they say, are tapped out and unwilling to open their wallets for a lost cause.

All along, Landrieu’s biggest hurdle has been the political climate, which helped the Republicans take eight other ­Democratic-held Senate seats.

Party strategists also fault her campaign for disregarding advice from Washington and spending virtually all of its war chest on the November election, in hopes of avoiding a runoff. She got just over 42 percent of the vote in the eight-candidate field — eight percentage points shy of the showing she needed to win outright.

And not just the Democratic Party, either:

An analysis of data by Kantar Media/CMAG for the Center for Public Integrity found that outside groups allied with Cassidy have put up about 6,000 ads during the runoff period. That compares with fewer than 100 by those supporting Landrieu, whose most active supporter has been the Humane Society Legislative Fund.

It’s going to be ugly for Landrieu on Saturday, and it looks like everyone on the Left is hitting warp speed to escape from the stench.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/04/new-poll-shows-landrieu-closing-gap-in-louisiana-to-er-24-points/feed/592479261McConnell elected Senate Majority Leader – unanimouslyhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/13/mcconnell-elected-senate-majority-leader-unanimously/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/13/mcconnell-elected-senate-majority-leader-unanimously/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 19:01:38 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2121385As Roll Call notes, there was not much drama on the Republican side of the Senate over the leadership elections. Mitch McConnell and his team had just presided over a stunning midterm victory, a near-sweep of every competitive contest, and almost got a huge surprise win in Virginia. Success breeds success — and in this case, unanimity. McConnell and his entire slate got elected by acclamation:

Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire nominated McConnell, according to a GOP source inside the room, and Sen.-elect Tom Cotton of Arkansas gave a seconding speech. He won a voice vote without opposition and was treated to a standing ovation.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas was likewise selected, by voice vote without contention, as the party’s whip. He was nominated by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and seconded by Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota will reprise his role as conference chairman, also winning a voice vote. He was nominated by Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia and seconded by Sen.-elect Cory Gardner of Colorado.

The interesting aspect of this slate is the, er, continuity it displays. The so-called establishment has firm control over Senate leadership, backed in a couple of instances here by grassroots-fueled newcomers like Cotton and Gardner. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and even Marco Rubio have no seats at this table, but that may be by a more beneficent design, too. All three have made some noises as contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination, and a Senate leadership position would likely be an impediment to running a campaign — especially if it meant falling in line for compromises on policies like immigration and budgets.

So call this the “pragmatist” lineup more than anything else. Republicans want to spend the next two years demonstrating that they can govern as effectively as they can act as opposition. This prepares them for the inevitable attacks that will come from an increasingly frustrated White House that will have to issue veto after veto in the twilight of the Barack Obama era. Obama is making their job easier and easier by moving farther and farther to the Left, too. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Obama and his team to claim that any logjams in Washington are the result of Republican extremism with this lineup of Senate leadership.

Poll after poll has shown support for Keystone is somewhere between very strong and overwhelming. A Pew Research Center survey this month showed support for the project at nearly two-to-one, 59 percent to 31 percent. And that was about the lowest level of support we’ve seen to date. Support has registered as high as two-thirds of Americans.

According to Pew’s breakdown from June, three of the four Democratic-leaning groups — including religious Democrats, young Democrats and the most moderate Democratic leaners — all supported the project two-to-one.

Which is a long way of saying that Obama would likely have very few supporters were he to wield his veto pen, as the White House suggests he will following votes by the House and Senate — which by all indications will approve the bill.

The White House, if it does veto the bill, will apparently argue that it can’t approve it before the lengthy State Department review of the project’s environmental impact is complete — along with a Supreme Court case in Nebraska concerning a key part of the pipeline’s route. That’s fine, but it still remains that a strong majority of Americans are pretty keen on getting the pipeline done.

A Keystone veto would put Obama squarely on the fringe even before McConnell begins running the Senate. McConnell couldn’t ask for a bigger gift for Christmas.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/13/mcconnell-elected-senate-majority-leader-unanimously/feed/952121385Obama signals leftward shift after electorate shifts to righthttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/13/obama-signals-leftward-shift-after-electorate-shifts-to-right/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/13/obama-signals-leftward-shift-after-electorate-shifts-to-right/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 17:01:36 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2119517When it comes to detachment from reality, one can run the spectrum from missing a memo to full-on denial. Barack Obama firmly planted his flag in Camp Denial almost immediately after the election, claiming that the message from Election Day was bipartisanship, and that he’s paying more attention to the people who didn’t vote. By Sunday, Obama allowed that “we got beat,” but said that he had no plans to divert from his agenda even after his second midterm disaster. The agenda wasn’t what got rejected, Obama claimed, but “a failure of politics” from the White House.

President Obama has taken significant steps to the left since his party’s devastating losses in the midterm elections.

In a surprise, he announced a major deal on climate change with China during a trip to Beijing Tuesday. That followed another unanticipated move — a Monday statement pressuring the Federal Communications Commission to adopt new net neutrality rules for the Internet.

The moves are helping to rally a dispirited Democratic base while re-establishing Obama’s political leadership after he was sidelined during the midterms.

“He’s at his best when his back is against the wall,” said Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. “Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Scott Brown’s election in 2009, after the first debate in 2012 — he comes back and tends to fight pretty hard.”

“He’s a fourth-quarter player, and he’s in the fourth quarter of his presidency,” Shrum added.

Perhaps, but Shrum forgets one thing. Those were campaigns, not governance. This administration has never understood the difference between them. This also ignores how Obama came back from those “fourth quarter” predicaments — by appealing to the center, not the hard Left. Obama cast himself as a post-racial politician eager to leave sharp divides in the rear-view mirror after Hillary Clinton’s campaign dug up the Jeremiah Wright tapes, and painted Mitt Romney as a conservative extremist and elitist (!) after the debate debacle two years ago.

The Jonathan Gruber tapes may make that kind of appeal moot now, but that’s not to say that an appeal to the extreme now is the antidote. It’s a hair–of-the-dog prescription that’s liable to make things a lot worse. Republicans scored a knockout in the midterms by painting Democrats as willing tools of a crypto-extremist President, and now Obama wants to validate their argument beyond all doubt.

Obama engaged in similar denial after the first midterm debacle. He refused to follow the example set by Bill Clinton of triangulation, opting instead to double down against a hostile Congress. That worked, at least somewhat; Obama got re-elected, but with millions fewer votes and a decline in the Electoral College, the first modern president to win under those circumstances. His coalition had already begun evaporating at that point, and has all but disappeared by now. Without Obama at the top of the ticket in 2016, Democrats may be left with a vast wreckage and the kind of intramural split that crippled Republicans in 2008 and 2012.

Obama may soon have to tackle another issue that is a flash point between his environmental base and many lawmakers: approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport heavy crude from Canada’s oil sands region to Gulf Coast refineries.

Senate Democrats are taking up a bill authorizing the permit as a way to boost the political fortunes of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who is facing a Dec. 6 runoff against Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.); the House is preparing to pass its own bill on the subject Thursday.

Aides say Obama is prepared to veto the bill–exercising a power that he has used only twice before.

“The Democrats on the national level are basically throwing in the towel on Mary. That’s how people are reading it here,” said Ron Nabonne, a New Orleans-based attorney and political consultant for over 30 years. …

A former Louisiana Democratic operative said Landrieu’s goose was cooked.

“She just can’t win. It’s just not mathematically possible,” said the Democrat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The way you win statewide in Louisiana is you get 95 percent of the black vote, a good African-American turnout, and 30 to 33 percent of the white vote. And she’s at 20! … Where does she gain? If you put her at 23 percent now, how does she gain 10 points with white voters in a month?” …

“Keystone pipeline? Gimme a break,” the former Democratic operative said. “C’mon. That’s not gonna get you there.”

Two more years of this kind of refusal to listen to the electorate spells trouble for Democrats, and even more vindication for Republicans. If Obama insists on drifting even farther to the Left while issuing veto after veto, those same voters will conclude that it’s the White House that’s the problem, and not the other end of Capitol Hill — and that will burnish the governance credentials of the GOP. Fewer and fewer voters will align themselves with a tone-deaf administration that keeps looking more and more incompetent. Obama and his advisors should worry less about the Keystone pipeline and more about their Keystone Kops image.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/13/obama-signals-leftward-shift-after-electorate-shifts-to-right/feed/832119517Nancy Pelosi: That wasn’t a wavehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/nancy-pelosi-that-wasnt-a-wave/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/nancy-pelosi-that-wasnt-a-wave/#commentsThu, 13 Nov 2014 01:01:02 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2109983A Twitter pal sums up her argument to Republicans this way: “They don’t love you, they just hate me so much more.”

“I do not believe what happened the other night is a wave,” Pelosi said in her first sit-down interview since Democrats lost a dozen House seats to Republicans on Nov. 4. “There was no wave of approval for the Republicans. I wish them congratulations, they won the election, but there was no wave of approval for anybody. There was an ebbing, an ebb tide, for us.”

As for whether she would consider stepping down as minority leader, Pelosi said she’s needed now more than ever.

“Quite frankly, if we would have won, I would have thought about leaving,” Pelosi declared, a remark that will likely surprise both admirers and detractors.

Alternate headline: “Blogger now regrets GOP wave.”

What an odd stance for a leader of a caucus to take. If anything, you’d think Pelosi would be invested in pushing the opposite position. If Democrats lost due to ebbing public support rather than to a swell of good vibes for the GOP, it must be because the people in charge of the Democratic Party have steered it into a ditch. Annnd who’s been steering the House Democratic caucus for the past 10 years? She and her pal Barack have managed an amazing feat: For the first time in a decade, even the broadly unpopular GOP is several points more popular than Democrats are.

So huge is the GOP’s advantage in the House now after six years of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid that Democrats likely won’t have a shot at reclaiming a majority until 2022 at the earliest, when Pelosi will be 82. (A month ago, she was aiming to retake the House by 2016. Heh.) And don’t think her own caucus doesn’t hold her partly responsible. They’re quietly looking around for someone to replace her, even though she’s expected to run again for minority leader and win. Frustrated Dems reportedly want her to expand her inner circle to include new voices, but one key legacy of Obama and Pelosi after ObamaCare is that there are many fewer Democratic voices left to include. The party’s been wiped out in purple districts; in desperation, John Barrow framed himself as an anti-Pelosi Democrat in running for reelection this year (not the only member of the caucus to do so either) and lost anyway. How many more don’t-call-it-a-waves will it take to move her on into retirement?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/nancy-pelosi-that-wasnt-a-wave/feed/1042109983WaPo: Senate Dems may pass Keystone approval — to rescue Landrieuhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/wapo-senate-dems-may-pass-keystone-approval-to-rescue-landrieu/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/wapo-senate-dems-may-pass-keystone-approval-to-rescue-landrieu/#commentsWed, 12 Nov 2014 15:01:45 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2106332How desperate are Democrats to salvage the one Senate seat they still haven’t quite lost in the midterm elections? Desperate enough to anger their environmental-progressive base and threaten their ability to compete in 2016? It may come down to that question in the lame-duck Senate over the last few days of the Democratic majority. The Washington Post reports that Harry Reid and his caucus may try rescuing Mary Landrieu by passing an approval of the Keystone XL pipeline project, a key policy goal for Republicans and a big economic issue in Louisiana:

Senate Democrats are working on plans to hold a vote authorizing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline — approval that Democrats believe might bolster the chances of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who faces a tough runoff election next month.

Such a move would also draw howls from the environmental movement who had hoped that President Obama would resolve a years-long dispute over a long-awaited energy project in their favor.

Several Senate Democratic aides confirmed on Tuesday evening that talks are underway to allow for a vote authorizing construction of the pipeline in the coming days. The aides, who were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, said that details on language of the bill authorizing and its timing were not yet settled, but likely would be among the topics of conversation as Congress reconvenes Wednesday.

Landrieu is expected to make a formal announcement of plans to hold a vote later Tuesday or on Wednesday, the aides said.

As pandering goes, this qualifies as first class. Landrieu arguably wouldn’t have been in this kind of trouble had Harry Reid and Senate Democrats stiff-armed the environmental extremists and approved the pipeline years ago. On the other hand, it’s possible that Barack Obama is so unpopular with red-state Louisiana voters that Keystone wouldn’t make any difference. If so, it won’t make any difference now either, especially not after Landrieu accused voters in her state of not liking Obama because of their latent racism, and blamed her difficulties in the midterm on their sexism.

Speaking of Obama, just where does he fit into this scenario? House Republicans managed to insert action on Keystone into a previous budget agreement, only to have the White House ignore it. Obama clearly wants to stall this to death. If the Senate passes a standalone bill for Keystone in time to help Landrieu, will Obama sign it — or veto it? The latter might help Landrieu but would betray one of the last constituencies still clinging to Obama after six years of incompetence and obfuscation. A veto would make Senate Democrats look weak and ineffectual, while doing nothing for Landrieu. And in the end, with Landrieu only getting 42% of the vote as the only Democrat in the election on Tuesday, in a state that has a 39% approval rating for Obama, any Keystone action would probably only nibble at the edge of a double-digit defeat in a runoff turnout.

Republicans have promised Bill Cassidy a seat on the Senate’s energy committee if he defeats Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in Louisiana’s runoff election next month, potentially undercutting one of her main arguments for re-election. …

[I]ncoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement released to The Associated Press that he will appoint Cassidy to the committee should Cassidy win his Dec. 6 runoff election against Landrieu.

“I’m confident Dr. Cassidy will use this position to succeed where Sen. Landrieu failed,” McConnell said in a statement touting Cassidy’s support for the Keystone XL pipeline and opposition to Obama administration efforts to place new restrictions on carbon emissions.

Landrieu had warned voters that losing her seat on the committee would reduce their influence on energy policies, although as the Keystone debacle (and the moratorium on Gulf drilling Obama imposed) demonstrates, Landrieu’s presence hasn’t done all that much for her home state. McConnell’s pledge changes the game entirely. The question is no longer whether voters have to choose whether they get a seat on the Energy committee or not — it’s whether they want a minority seat or a majority seat. They can get both Keystone and a majority seat in the next Congress, or keep limping along with the ineffectual Landrieu. Decisions, decisions …

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/wapo-senate-dems-may-pass-keystone-approval-to-rescue-landrieu/feed/742106332Referendum: Majority wants GOP to set the agenda for next two years in Gallup pollhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/referendum-majority-wants-gop-to-set-the-agenda-for-next-two-years-in-gallup-poll/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/referendum-majority-wants-gop-to-set-the-agenda-for-next-two-years-in-gallup-poll/#commentsWed, 12 Nov 2014 14:31:04 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2105971Democrats have spent the past week attempting to put the best possible spin on the midterm elections they can find. Voters say they want us to work together, said both Harry Reid and Barack Obama, even though voters kicked Democrats out of office while leaving Republican incumbents firmly in place — even in Kansas, where Democrats thought they had pulled the wool over voters’ eyes with a transparently shabby bait-and-switch after the primary. Lowest turnout in decades, others argued, telling anyone who’d listen that Republicans had no mandate despite rolling to their largest Congressional win in decades, if not a century.

Following the midterm election that some have termed a Republican wave, the majority of Americans want the Republicans in Congress — rather than President Barack Obama — to have more influence over the direction the country takes in the coming year. This is a switch from early 2012 when a slim plurality, 46%, wanted Obama to prevail in steering the nation.

Republicans’ 17-percentage-point edge over Obama on this measure exceeds what they earned after the 2010 midterm, when Americans favored Republicans by an eight-point margin (49% to 41%). It also eclipses the nine-point advantage Republicans had over Bill Clinton following the 1994 midterm in which Republicans captured the majority of both houses.

Note that this poll was taken from November 6-9, starting the day after the spin began. Obama gave a televised speech on November 5th in which he argued that the election had nothing to do with him, and that he was listening to the two-thirds of voters who weren’t interested enough to turn out. That argument appears to have fallen flat with the electorate, even the two-thirds to whom Obama has pitched his ears.

This shows that the midterms were clearly a referendum on Obama and his leadership. Only 36% want the President to steer the policy agenda, which actually is lower than Gallup’s approval rating for Obama, 39/56, in almost the same polling period. That number has to be close to what an Obama polling floor would be, which means that Obama has lost all but the most loyal of his followers.

Even among Democrats, though, the polling doesn’t look good for Obama. Overall, almost twice as many say the country will be better off with the GOP in full charge of Congress (34%) than worse (19%), although a plurality say it won’t make any difference (44%). That is almost identical to the number of Democrats who say losing Congress won’t make a difference (43%), and 12% of them think the country will be better off with GOP leadership on Capitol Hill. Ouch.

That’s not the only indicator of trouble for Democrats. In a separate Gallup poll, their party has dropped to its lowest favorable rating in 22 years of surveying — and now trail the GOP by six points:

After the midterm elections that saw the Democratic Party suffer significant losses in Congress, a record-low 36% of Americans say they have a favorable opinion of the party, down six percentage points from before the elections. The Republican Party’s favorable rating, at 42%, is essentially unchanged from 40%. This marks the first time since September 2011 that the Republican Party has had a higher favorability rating than the Democratic Party. …

The descent in Democrats’ ratings caps a wild political ride for both parties over the past two years. After President Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, the Democratic Party’s favorable rating spiked to 51%, the first time either party had enjoyed majority support since 2009. However, after the post-election glow wore off, the party’s image settled back down near the 45% average for the Obama presidency. Meanwhile, Americans’ favorable ratings of the Republican Party collapsed to 28% during the fall 2013 federal government shutdown, the lowest such rating for either party since Gallup first asked the question in 1992.

That’s a lesson for the new Republican majority in Congress. Voters want leadership and a real agenda more than they want stunts. But the overall picture for Democrats looks exceedingly bleak for the next two years, and possibly beyond — and it will look even worse the longer their party’s leaders remain in denial over the resounding rebuke they received last week.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/referendum-majority-wants-gop-to-set-the-agenda-for-next-two-years-in-gallup-poll/feed/532105971AP calls Sullivan the winner in Alaska Senate racehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/ap-calls-sullivan-the-winner-in-alaska-senate-race/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/ap-calls-sullivan-the-winner-in-alaska-senate-race/#commentsWed, 12 Nov 2014 13:31:50 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2105645Republicans picked up another Senate takeaway overnight — at least according to the Associated Press, which called Dan Sullivan the winner in the Alaska election. With 40% of the 50,000 absentee ballots counted, Sullivan’s lead has barely changed over incumbent Democrat Mark Begich, and the almost-8,000 vote lead looks insurmountable with just 30,000 ballots left. Begich isn’t conceding yet, though:

Sullivan led Begich by about 8,100 votes on Election Night last week and held a comparable edge after election workers had counted about 20,000 absentee, early-voted and questioned ballots late Tuesday. Thousands more ballots remained to be counted, but the results indicated that Begich could not overcome Sullivan’s lead.

The Alaska seat was initially considered key to the Republicans’ hopes of taking control of the U.S. Senate, but that goal was accomplished before the Alaska race was decided. …

Begich was not conceding. His campaign manager, Susanne Fleek-Green, said in a statement that Begich believes every vote deserves to be counted and will follow the Division of Elections as it continues toward a final count.

Begich is no stranger to come-from-behind wins. In 2008, Republican Sen. Ted Stevens led Begich by about 3,000 votes in a race Begich won about two weeks later by fewer than 4,000 votes.

The dynamics of that race were different, however, with the election coming days after a jury found Stevens guilty in a federal corruption trial. The case was later tossed out by a judge, prompting many Republicans to believe Begich’s win was a fluke.

In that case, with the guilty verdict ringing in voters’ ears, the absentee ballots mailed in the final days no doubt provided a boost to the Democrat, although it’s probably a little too glib to call Begich a fluke. The Begich name carries significant weight in Alaska politics, and the long tenure of Stevens had conflicted with the “hope and change” political impulse of that cycle. Stevens’ pork-barrel politics, although usually popular in Alaska, became a bit of an embarrassment, especially with the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Stevens might have won except for that conviction, but Begich was a legitimate contender.

In fact, even with the Republican wave, Begich turned out to be a legitimate contender in a red state this year, too. Thanks to the difficulties of polling in this state, no one was quite sure how the race would turn out, but most people assumed it would be a close-run Republican win. That same expectation turned out to be laughably wrong in places like Georgia, Kentucky, and even Kansas, but Begich made it a race in Alaska.

However, the end is certainly nigh now. With around 30,000 ballots to go, Begich would have to win 19,000 to edge Sullivan, which is 63% of the remaining ballots. Absentee ballots generally tilt Republican in Alaska, not Democratic, and the trend through the first two-fifths of the absentees has been an almost-even split, so getting 63% of the remaining votes looks more and more like sheer fantasy for the Democratic incumbent. Sheer fantasy doesn’t cost Begich anything at this point, though, so why concede?

The shoe may soon be on the other foot in the gubernatorial race, though. Bill Walker’s unity ticket slightly extended its lead over incumbent Republican Sean Parnell overnight:

In the governor’s race after Tuesday’s update, Walker had 117,130 total votes to Parnell’s 113,126, giving Walker a 4,004-vote or 1.6 percent edge.

That was slightly higher than the count on election night, when Walker had a 1.4 percent lead — a difference of 3,165 votes — over Parnell.

“We have to make up some ground and it will be have to be somewhat substantial,” said Parnell’s campaign manager Tom Wright, before adding, “…there’s a lot of ballots left. It looks like it’s been back and forth today.”

Absentee votes typically skew Republican, Wright said, but it’s difficult to judge what will happen as counting continues because it’s unknown how many Republican voters cast a ballot in favor of Walker.

Walker, who had been running as an independent, changed his Republican registration to “undeclared” when his running mate, Democrat Byron Mallott, abandoned his own campaign for governor and signed on to the Walker ticket as lieutenant governor in September.

With 30,000 votes left, Parnell needs to get 55.2% of the remaining vote. That’s at least a little more realistic than Begich’s situation, especially because Parnell is the Republican. However, the first 20,000 absentee ballots didn’t split out that way, and it’s less and less likely that such a trend will develop in what they have left. This one may stretch out for a couple of more counting sessions, but don’t be surprised if the AP makes a call in the gubernatorial race soon, too.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/12/ap-calls-sullivan-the-winner-in-alaska-senate-race/feed/552105645Walker: Hillary’s “old, tired” … approach to governancehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/walker-hillarys-old-tired-approach-to-governance/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/walker-hillarys-old-tired-approach-to-governance/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 19:01:36 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2092606Do readers sense a theme developing? Rand Paul made Hillary Clinton’s age an explicit attack point this weekend, but Scott Walker tries a slightly more subtle approach. It’s not that Hillary is old and tired, mind you, but that her big-government, top-down approach has gone past its bedtime:

“I think the biggest loser a week ago was Hillary Clinton,” Walker, a possible Republican White House conteder in 2016, said in comments on Fox News.

“She embodies Washington. She embodies that old, tired top-down approach from the government. I think in the states as governors, we offer a much better alternative and I think there’s a number of us who would be good prospects out there.”

That’s a clever, if not entirely subtle, campaign slogan. There’s nothing wrong with making age an issue in a campaign, or at least there wasn’t when Democrats did it with John McCain, Bob Dole, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom were about the same age as Hillary will be when the election rolls around (68, 69 on Inauguration Day in 2017). I’d have to consult my Republican-to-Democrat dictionary on the precise conditions that makes age references become seeeeeeeeeexist (best guess: when it hurts Democrats), but there’s been lots of precedent from Democrats on that line of attack. Explicit mentions of age and health might look ungallant when aimed at a woman — let’s face it, there’s still a cultural resistance to this for which Republicans have to calculate — but going after Hillary’s big-government approach and the Nostalgia Tour quality of a Clinton run for the White House could be very effective at making the same point, without the lingering distaste.

Speaking of which, Democrats will face an ironic reversal of optics from 2008, 1996, and 1992 if Hillary wins the nomination. Practically every contender on the Republican side will be much younger than Hillary on the dais, and conspicuously so. As Republicans learned the hard way in those earlier elections, voters like to look forward rather than to the past, which is one reason that World War II heroes like George H. W. Bush and Dole lost to a Baby Boomer who played Fleetwod Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)” as his campaign song. That dynamic will play hard against Democrats, even beyond Hillary’s attempt at throwback politics and dodging of the disastrous Barack Obama legacy on foreign policy, much of which belongs to her.

And speaking of catastrophes, a million dollars just doesn’t buy much these days, huh? Bill and Hillary Clinton hit the hustings for fellow Democrats in this election cycle, as much as to salvage as much as they could from the midterms as to build momentum for Hillary’s presumed 2016 presidential campaign. So far, Ruby Cramer reports at Buzzfeed, the campaign filings from Democrats in the midterm election confirm that various Democratic campaigns spent $700,000 on travel costs for the Clintons, and that will stretch into seven figures:

Bill and Hillary Clinton were the most sought after surrogates in the Democratic Party this year. He campaigned for more than 47 candidates. She for more than 26. Supporters estimate that, together, the Clintons headlined 75 rallies and fundraisers — and logged roughly 50,000 miles jetting from state to state.

When the Clintons travel, they fly private. This year, their airfare cost candidates at least $699,000, available state and federal campaign finance reports show.

Payments from campaigns and party committees to Executive Fliteways, the independent charter company the Clintons use, could be found for just under half of the trips the former first family took on behalf of Democrats this year.

The costs of two Clintons trips — one to Iowa, the other to Kentucky — were reported earlier this fall by Bloomberg and Politico, respectively.

But the $699,000 figure is the first comprehensive estimate that establishes the scope of the costs associated with using the Clintons as surrogates. By the time the rest of the filings come in, the number will likely exceed $1 million.

As Cramer notes, the Clintons aren’t allowed to pay for flights that benefit other campaigns, but … they don’t have to fly on private planes, either. They could choose to fly commercial, which would lessen the overhead considerably. It would also put Hillary in touch with the hoi polloi, which one might think would be a priority for a presidential contender. Mitt Romney flies commercial much more regularly, and fellow travelers end up tweeting out their contacts with the once (and future?) candidate.

Besides, for the value, Democrats clearly should have rethought the expense. Last week, America Rising put together a list of Hillary’s campaign efforts, which produced more than a dozen losses — including an embarrassing defeat in their former home state of Arkansas:

She was touted as a savior for Kentucky Senate Candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes. She LOST by double digits.

*NOTE: Grimes paid $17,000 to fly Hillary to Kentucky to campaign for her.

She campaigned down the stretch for IA Senate Candidate Bruce Braley. He LOST by 8 points in a state Obama won twice

The Clinton brand was said to be gold in Arkansas. She and Bill campaigned for AR Senator Mark Pryor extensively. He LOST by SEVENTEEN POINTS.

It looks like the Clintons’ influence is also “old and tired” these days. For those kind of results, Democrats should have bought coach tickets through Travelocity.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/walker-hillarys-old-tired-approach-to-governance/feed/652092606Beware talk of the “permanent majority”http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/beware-talk-of-the-permanent-majority/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/beware-talk-of-the-permanent-majority/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 17:01:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2091614But it’s sooooooo seductive, isn’t it? We all want to think that the rest of the country has finally awoken to the dangers of Democratic/Republican policies, and have delivered an enduring mandate for conservative/progressive/libertarian/Vermin Supreme policies. In fact, it’s so seductive that the meme captured the imaginations of Republicans in 1994 and Democrats in 2006. How about now?

By picking up at least a dozen House seats in the elections last Tuesday, the Republicans cemented a nearly unassailable majority that could last for a generation, or as long as today’s political divides between North and South, urban and rural, young and old, and white and nonwhite endure.

Democrats might well reclaim the Senate and hold the presidency in 2016. But any Democratic hopes of enacting progressive policies on issues like climate change and inequality will face the reality of a House dominated by conservative Republicans. It is far likelier that the Republicans will hold the Senate and seize the presidency than that the Democrats will win the House, giving the Republicans a better chance than Democrats of enacting their agenda.

After all of the remaining races are resolved, the G.O.P. will finish with about 249 seats. The Democrats would need to flip 32 seats to reclaim the chamber, but just 10 Republicans hail from districts with a Democratic Cook partisan voting index, a statistic to measure how far a congressional district leans toward the Republican or Democratic Party, compared with the national average. Because so many Republicans represent conservative districts, the G.O.P. might even retain the House in a “wave” election, like the ones that swept Democrats to power in 2006 and brought Republicans back to power in 2010.

The Republican grip on the House is underpinned by the tendency for Democrats to waste votes in heavily urban or nonwhite districts; the low Democratic turnout in off-year elections; the recent Democratic advantage in presidential elections; the advantages of incumbency; and partisan gerrymandering. Ending partisan gerrymandering would not be enough to end the Republican advantage in the House, and last Tuesday’s results for state legislatures and for governors’ races further strengthened the Republicans’ ability to control the redistricting process.

The head of the National Republican Congressional Committee thinks the GOP might run Congress for the rest of our lives, and then some.

“We’re as back to a majority as any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) said, according to The Hill. “It may be a hundred-year majority.”

Er … sure. Democrats dominated for 40 years, largely on the back of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, until Republicans shocked Democrats with the Contract with America in 1994. Having lived through three “permanent majorities” in my lifetime now, I’m a little skeptical of claims that we’re entering into a real political realignment after the third flip in House control in 20 years:

Still, history cautions against Republican optimism and Democratic despair. As we have seen over the last 20 years, it’s usually folly to assume that parties can avoid overreach and scandal for very long. Turnout in this wave election was historically low, which argues against learning any significant lessons on demography and sustainability. Unlike 1994, Republicans did not run on a unifying national platform; they relied instead on deep dissatisfaction with President Obama and Democratic leadership in the Senate that refused to check his perceived abuses. That parallels 2006 most closely, which means that the one mandate Republicans can claim would be to force Obama to work with the GOP on their terms, as voters either turned out to oppose Obama or didn’t bother to turn out in his support. That mandate could mean an even higher risk of overreach, although the lack of electoral consequences for last fall’s government shutdown suggests voters are very fed up with the White House.

Even if Republicans manage to step carefully through the political minefield of the next two years, the departure of Obama from the presidency might undermine the urgency voters felt to remove Democrats from power at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Success in 2016 in taking back the White House could mean an eventual drift of voters into divided government once again, especially if the next president and his allies go back to “my way or the highway” initiatives.

The phrase “I won” has a very short shelf life. Barack Obama has learned that lesson twice, as have Democrats — and Republicans have learned it at least once in the last decade. Will the GOP remember that hard lesson as it considers its options? That will probably be the biggest factor in whether Cohn’s prediction of a generational majority will come true, but with history as a guide … don’t bet on it.

Talk about a shellacking. Two-thirds of voters in last week’s elections are dissatisfied or angry with Republican Party leaders in Congress, according to exit polls, and nearly six in 10 disapprove of the GOP altogether.

While it’s undeniable which party won the most campaigns this year, the Republican Party didn’t win the overall election – not with numbers like that. The winners were disgust, apathy, and a gnawing desire for a better choice – an alternative to what the two major parties currently are offering. …

The most obvious takeaway from the 2014 midterms is that it was a repudiation of Obama. One-third of voters said they cast their ballot in protest of the president, a rate similar to 2010 and 2006. Six of every 10 voters said they were dissatisfied or angry with Obama, equal to the amount who said the same of GOP leaders. A solid majority of voters said they disapprove of his party. …

Among the old structures that need to be sidelined or radically changed are the two major parties. Neither actually competes to be the best party, only the least-lousy choice. Neither is capable at the moment of winning elections; only losing less than the other guys. Neither party inspires, but they both divide and, occasionally, conquer.

I disagree with Ron to the extent that I think Republicans won the midterms, especially at the state level. Those races tend to be more about the local environment than the national environment, and the expanse of the victory is too broad to suggest that it’s just a mere reaction to Obama. On the national level, though, Ron’s closer to the target, which is why talk of permanent majorities or even generational majorities is premature at best, and misses the point. Now that they have the majority, what kind of governance will Republicans provide? That will determine the longevity of their control.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/beware-talk-of-the-permanent-majority/feed/562091614WaPo: Almost half of all Americans will live in Republican-controlled stateshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/wapo-almost-half-of-all-americans-will-live-in-republican-controlled-states/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/wapo-almost-half-of-all-americans-will-live-in-republican-controlled-states/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 14:31:54 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2090253When Aaron Blake says “nearly half,” he’s not kidding. Thanks to the massive Republican wave one week ago, 49.7% of the US population will now live in states where the GOP controls the legislature and the executive. Only slightly more than 15% will live in Democrat-controlled states, a much wider gap than after the 2010 GOP wave:

While the GOP is likely to control 54 percent of all Senate seats and 56 percent (or so) of the House come January, it also will now control more than two-thirds of state legislative chambers across the country — as in nearly seven in 10. And given Republicans also won at least 31 governorships, they are basically in control of the state government in 25 states. That could soon hit 26 if they win the still-undetermined governor’s race in Alaska. …

The Democrats, meanwhile, control just six states, with a seventh likely to come when the Vermont legislature picks Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) as the winner of last week’s closer-than-expected election, in which neither candidate attained the necessary 50 percent.

That 25-6 split is actually significantly bigger than it was after 2010, when Republicans emerged from that wave election with complete control of 21 states, to Democrats’ 11 — about a two-to-one advantage, versus today’s four-to-one edge.

Blake notes that a win in Alaska’s gubernatorial race would make the percentage almost precisely half — 49.96%, to be exact. At the moment, incumbent Republican governor Sean Parnell trails by about 3,000 votes, but the state has tens of thousands of absentee ballots to count, more of which are coming in the mail until November 19th. Dan Sullivan has all but wrapped up the Senate race for the GOP as the counting begins today, but Parnell may be more of a long shot against independent Bill Walker.

This matters for lots of reasons, not the least of which is that conservatism works best in a subsidiarity mode – putting resources closest to where they are most needed, and properly managed. Successes in these states will build the conservative policy brand, both through success of the policies themselves and the politicians who implement them. That will impact candidate selection in the future, providing the GOP with better candidates for federal offices, and encourage young activists to join the Republican Party as part of their future. The potential dynamic of this multiplier effect should not be overlooked — and in fact, should be aggressively cultivated.

Michael Bloomberg agrees, by the way. That’s why he’s going to start throwing money at the state and local level rather than repeating his failures at the national level:

“You can keep hitting your head against a wall, or you can go elsewhere,” Bloomberg said in a statement to POLITICO. “Change is really possible at the state and local level.”

His political advisers are already scouting states where his big checks could help promote soda taxes and background checks for handgun purchasers. He’s also looking for states to promote nonpartisan primaries and redistricting, similar to a measure that failed in Oregon this month despite his $2.1 million contribution.

Bloomberg, ranked by Forbes as the eighth-richest man in America, with a net worth of $35 billion, also plans to invest heavily in governor’s races in 2016. He’s looking for candidates with business backgrounds; a willingness to challenge some part of party orthodoxy; a record of working across party lines; and an emphasis on issues he cares about: curbing gun violence, easing immigration restrictions, and reforming education and pensions.

“Go someplace where everybody isn’t,” said Howard Wolfson, who was a deputy mayor for Bloomberg and now is his senior adviser. “Especially, by the way, if those are the places where people are … actually doing something.”

The problem for Bloomberg is that his nanny-state philosophy won’t sell terribly well at the local and state level, certainly not any better than at the federal level, except in states where the prevailing political trend is already towards the Left. (In other words … Minnesota, although the GOP won the state House this year.) Subsidiarity sells bestat the local level; it’s only when it comes to the great unwashed rubes in the rest of the country that voters want elites controlling the lives of others.

On the other hand, who knows what sells in a vacuum? If the GOP and conservatives want to leverage this advantage for more than a cycle, they had better tend to the farm.

Update: I got Sean Parnell’s first name incorrect in the original post; I’ve fixed it above. Note to self: Not every Republican governor is named Scott.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/11/wapo-almost-half-of-all-americans-will-live-in-republican-controlled-states/feed/362090253Oh my: Romney aides circulating memo contrasting him with Hillary as 2016 primary season loomshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/oh-my-romney-aides-circulating-memo-contrasting-him-with-hillary-as-primary-season-looms/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/oh-my-romney-aides-circulating-memo-contrasting-him-with-hillary-as-primary-season-looms/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 01:31:00 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2081860One way to look at Dubya’s claim that Jeb Bush is 50/50 about running is that that means Romney is 50/50, or close to 50/50, too. If Jeb says no, the door is open. And more importantly, even if it’s only open a crack now, Romney’s inner circle is working hard to kick it in.

You guys need to stop resisting this. Embrace destiny.

In the days after the election, a group of Romney supporters began circulating a memo that compared the success of his midterm endorsements with those made by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

The documents — which were obtained by The Washington Post — concluded that two out of three Romney candidates won their elections, compared with one in three for Clinton.

According to three Republicans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, Romney’s associates are convinced that if former Florida governor Jeb Bush does not run, Romney could consider another White House bid. He has told friends that he feels positive about the likely GOP field, but also worries that many of the contenders may not have what it takes to beat Clinton…

The Republicans familiar with Romney’s inner circle said the medium is part of the message. To nudge the data-driven Romney, they are deliberately charting returns and his recent political activity in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, knowing that numbers are the best way to win his attention. In chats with him, they also are talking up his standing in the party, which they argue has been bolstered by his work for the party this year.

“So what?” you say. “All that proves is that Romney’s aides want him to run. That doesn’t say anything about his own intentions.” Fair enough — except that WaPo also reports that the man himself made more than 80(!) phone calls on election night to Republican winners around the country to congratulate them on their victories. Why would a man who’d campaigned tirelessly around the country for Republican candidates choose to call them instead of waiting for them to call him to say thanks? Why would he be so comprehensive in his calling instead of phoning a few choice candidates whom he knows well, like Charlie Baker in Massachusetts? You know why: Because he’s thinking of running and was eager to remind the new crop of GOP power brokers that he did them a favor, just in case he needs a little favor from them in return around a year from now. (Especially since Chris Christie and Rand Paul will be asking the same group of people for a similar favor.) Realistically there’s no other explanation for a “retired” pol to be working the phones like that.

Longtime Romney skeptic Phil Klein sees the light on the train in the distance and begs Republicans to get off the tracks while there’s still time. This time it’s a conservative or bust, says Klein:

The deeper issue is that when the Republican nominee is somebody who conservatives are suspicious of, the nominee has to spend the whole primary trying to convince conservatives that he or she agrees with them, and then the general election constantly reassuring them that he or she isn’t going to abandon the right just because the nomination has been sewn up. This leads to incoherent campaign messaging.

The popular myth is that a winning candidate has to play to the base in the primaries and then move to the center in the general election. But the reality is that winning candidates in both parties have tended to maintain a relatively consistent theme throughout their campaigns…

When base voters implicitly trust a candidate, they’re more likely to give that candidate the benefit of the doubt when he or she tries to communicate a message to appeal to the broader electorate, because they assume that deep down that candidate “gets it” and is “one of us.” A candidate who is constantly having to prove something to the base — from the declaration of candidacy to the waning hours of Election Day — is guaranteed to lose.

Nominate a guy like Cruz and he can spend the entire campaign pandering to the middle since conservatives feel 100 percent sure he’ll govern as a conservative in office. Obama benefited from the same logic on the left six years ago: He could reassure Rick Warren and evangelicals that he believed in traditional marriage with nary a peep from his progressive base because none of them thought he was serious. He was a loud and proud liberal, no matter he said in his attempt to get elected. He’d support gay marriage later even if he couldn’t support it sooner. Cruz will have that same advantage from the right. Will anyone else have it, though? Even conservative candidates like Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal, I think, might feel pressure to out-Cruz Cruz in the primaries by tacking further right than they’d prefer. I’m not sure anyone except him is above suspicion by grassroots righties.

Back to the WaPo piece, though. How likely it is that Mitt Romney, alleged managerial genius, would be swayed by a memo showing that he campaigned for many more winners on Tuesday night than Hillary did? Of course he campaigned for more winners than her; so did Christie, so did Paul. It was a wave! And if anyone should know that you can’t draw deep lessons about presidential elections from the midterm results, it’s Romney. One of his legacies will be that he somehow managed to lose badly against an incumbent president with unemployment at eight percent in between two of the most mammoth GOP electoral waves in modern American history. If he looks at that memo and concludes that it says something serious about his viability against the Clinton machine — well, let’s just say the performance of Project ORCA will start to make a lot more sense.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/oh-my-romney-aides-circulating-memo-contrasting-him-with-hillary-as-primary-season-looms/feed/1792081860Woodward: Senate Democrats are sick of Obama, toohttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/woodward-senate-democrats-are-sick-of-obama-too/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/woodward-senate-democrats-are-sick-of-obama-too/#commentsTue, 11 Nov 2014 00:01:11 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2082712Alternate headline: Obama brings consensus to Capitol Hill. Even when Bob Woodward floated this nugget on CBS’ Face the Nation yesterday during the panel discussion, it wasn’t really news. The soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader’s chief of staff ripped Barack Obama after his boss saw the eight-year majority crash to an end on Tuesday. When David Krone accused Obama of paying “lip service” to Senate Democrats and blame his “barely 40 percent approval rating” for the disaster, it was pretty clear that Krone’s attitude didn’t come out of the blue, if readers will pardon the pun. The White House tried tamping down reports of a feud as an issue entirely localized to Krone, but Bloomberg also noted that Reid’s office didn’t shy away from pushing the Washington Post story with Krone’s remarks out to social media accounts. Bloomberg’s Lisa Lerer also noted that the sentiment against Obama wasn’t limited to the upper chamber, either:

The details of Krone’s story are a bit complicated, but the sentiments certainly aren’t: Congressional Democrats, who’ve long felt unappreciated by the Obama White House, know the president is weakened by the midterm losses. They’re trying to deflect the blame—and seizing on the chance to finally take their private gripes public. That means the White House can probably look forward to a lot more stories like this one, unless they can find away to smooth relations among their own on Capitol Hill. But with just two years left, they may have already lost their chance.

Woodward confirms that second-term Obama is a uniter, all right:

Schieffer: I’m wondering about the talk after this election, I think the President’s relations with the Democrats in the Senate may be as bad as his relations with the Republicans.

Woodward: That’s absolutely true. You get the Democrats in private, and they are on fire! Just cause he won’t spend the time, because he won’t listen. Peggy [Noonan] said yesterday in her column, and I think there is real truth here: humility is power. And after you lose, you have to come out and kind of face up to that. And there’s a whole undercurrent in the President’s approach that, well, you know, it was bad but, you know, that was worse than bad. And I think, optimistically, I think he’s capable — and as you’re suggesting — he’s capable of changing and engaging in that outreach, and he just needs to do it and kind of get out of this bubble that he seems to be living in.

The “humility is power” comment relates to Obama’s attempt to dodge responsibility for the loss in the immediate aftermath of the elections. On the same show where Woodward made these remarks, Obama tried walking back his Wednesday remarks, but adopted the first person plural with “we got beat,” and tried to claim it’s because Democrats and his White House hadn’t been — wait for it — political enough. Somehow, this probably won’t qualify Obama for humility points, especially because it’s designed to deny that Obama’s policies had anything to do with his defeat.

That lack of humility, though, extends to the same people who are complaining about it from Obama, or at least the sense of denial. They’re looking for people to double down on confrontation, as though that was in short supply over the last eight years. Other than that, though, expect no change in direction, and expect that to create a lot more intramural fighting:

The decision to stick with the status quo sends a clear message that Democrats believe Tuesday’s disastrous outcome was caused by factors beyond their control, and that they see themselves as best suited to steer a comeback.
But it’s also sparked concern among some party operatives and rank-and-file members that the Democrats’ rebound strategy lacks fresh voices, novel ideas and a new public image.

Most of the grumbling is happening behind closed doors, but some are going public with calls for soul-searching in the party. …

A Democratic strategist said the unrest is not quite boiling over, but predicted it will gain steam throughout the next Congress before erupting after the 2016 elections.

“My sense is that there is a growing appetite within the [House Democratic] Caucus for, basically, generational change,” the strategist said. “At what point do we say, ‘OK, we’ve exhausted this approach to leadership,’ or, ‘This current leadership has taken us about as far as we can go, we need some new ideas and fresh voices?’ ”

“There will be a growing chorus of voices over the next couple of years,” the strategist said.

This is fun as a rare admission of defeat from one of Washington’s most robotically optimistic mouthpieces and also as a contrast to Obama’s post-electoral defiance, in which “self-reflection” means staring at yourself in the mirror admiringly while you sign an order amnestizing five million people. In fact, what she’s promising here sounds a lot like what the RNC promised after Romney got stomped in 2012 — with one key difference. The RNC’s autopsy was mainly about changing the GOP’s message in certain ways to appeal to different demographics. The DNC’s message will likely emphasize ways to boost Democratic turnout during midterm elections over changing the message. (“We know we’re right on the issues,” says Wasserman Schultz here.) The Republican base has turned out in every cycle recently; the Democratic base hasn’t. What if their leadership had figured out how to get them to turn out last Tuesday? Hmmmmm:

[I]f Iowa gives Republicans their biggest reason for hope, Colorado and North Carolina offer reasons for caution, even though Republicans won Senate seats in both. In those two states, the Republican victories appeared to rely on low turnout, and Democrats fared very well among college-educated white voters. In Colorado, Senator Mark Udall, a Democrat, lost by two points in a state that Mr. Obama won by five points. But Mr. Udall ran what was widely considered to be a mediocre campaign, focused relentlessly on Mr. Gardner’s past support for a “personhood” amendment that would confer constitutional rights at conception.

Had young voters and registered Democrats turned out at the rates they did in 2012, Mr. Udall would likely be looking forward to another term, according to an Upshot analysis of voter file data from the Colorado secretary of state.

Mr. Udall maintained nearly all of Mr. Obama’s support among college-educated white voters. He even outperformed Mr. Obama among college-educated white voters, according to exit polls. Jefferson County, a suburban county consisting mainly of well-educated white voters west of Denver, and a bellwether in statewide elections, went to Mr. Udall, narrowly.

The story was similar in North Carolina, where Ms. Hagan also ran ahead of Mr. Obama among college-educated white voters, according to the exit polls.

In 2012, when Obama narrowly defeated Romney in Colorado, voters age 29 or younger made up 20 percent of the electorate. Last week, in the Gardner/Udall race, they made up just 14 percent. Obama also topped Romney among both men and women, 51/46 and 51/48 respectively. The Gardner/Udall race had a gender gap: Udall won women by eight points (52/44) but Gardner won men by 17 (56/39) — and, crucially, men made up most of the electorate, 53 percent compared to 47 percent for women. In fact, among the key Democratic constituency of single women, Udall won 66/30, a wider margin than the 61/36 split that Obama pulled two years ago. In other words, as Ace noted, the obsessive “war on women” campaign run by Senator “Uterus” actually worked among the target audience. They’re just weren’t enough single women at the polls to drag Udall over the finish line. Maybe that was inevitable — it could be that a key reason male turnout was higher this time in Colorado was because so many men were irritated by Udall’s messaging that they decided to teach him a lesson. What would have happened, though, had Udall’s message been a bit more refined and this had been a presidential election year, with Democrats enjoying their traditional turnout boost? What would have happened if Democrats had the first woman presidential nominee at the top of the ballot? The DNC would be foolish to pass on an opportunity to refine their platform to make it a bit more attractive to whites, marrieds, and men, but if they want to solve their midterm problem through turnout alone, they could probably do it. I’m not sure the RNC has the same luxury when it comes to presidential elections.

Exit question: How optimistic should we be about winning Colorado in 2016? Cory Gardner was arguably the most impressive candidate in the field this year, ran a terrific campaign against a dumb incumbent who fixated on a one-note message, and had a national GOP wave beneath him — and he still won the state more narrowly than Obama did two years ago. Hmmmm.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-message-to-democrats-lets-face-it-our-party-has-a-problem/feed/452080605Obama: OK, yeah, we got beat on Tuesdayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/obama-ok-yeah-we-got-beat-on-tuesday/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/obama-ok-yeah-we-got-beat-on-tuesday/#commentsMon, 10 Nov 2014 17:31:29 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2078399A moment of real introspection from President Barack Obama (or perhaps Valerie Jarrett)? Not really, no. After a flop in his attempt to spin the midterm elections as unconnected to his presidency on Wednesday, Obama offered a slightly different deflection to Bob Schieffer on yesterday’s Face the Nation. Despite declaring a month ago that “every single one … of my policies” was on the ballot last Tuesday, Obama now says that he takes responsibility for the failure in Democratic Party politics that led to the worst midterm election in decades for Democrats:

Obama said the buck ultimately stops with him during an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” his first Sunday show appearance since September.

“And so whenever, as the head of the party, it doesn’t do well, I’ve got to take responsibility for it,” Obama said. “The message that I took from this election, and we’ve seen this in a number of elections, successive elections, is people want to see this city work.”

He was reacting to critical comments made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) chief of staff, who pointed to Obama’s low approval rating as one explanation for losses on Election Day.

Schieffer pressed him on getting ripped by Harry Reid’s office as the reason for the collapse on Election Day. Obama responds by stammering through a few versions of Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here,” which for some reason Obama can’t quite quote correctly, before allowing that the head of the party who just got its knees cut off by the voters might bear some responsibility for the loss.

However, Obama insists that the voters didn’t oppose his policies, but his supposed lack of interest in sales pitches. Obama argues that the failure in the midterms and his approval ratings relate to “a failure of politics there that we’ve got to improve on. … I think we have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we’re trying to do and why this is the right direction.” No one who has any connection to politics can argue with a straight face that this White House lacks for messaging effort, though; they impose strict discipline on messaging, aggressively challenge any criticism, and have plenty of proxies making media appearances on their behalf. Obama spent most of the midterm cycle making speeches at fundraisers, pushing his messaging and his policies. And yet, during that same period, Obama’s numbers plunged and the illusion of competence in his administration disintegrated.

In other words, voters rendered a substantive verdict, not a public-relations verdict. Plus, the notion (first floated by Harry Reid) that the loss was a signal for bipartisanship is complete bunk. The only incumbents handed their walking papers in the Senate were Democrats, who didn’t even win one of the open seats vacated by Republicans in this cycle. On the contrary, Democrats lost almost every open seat vacated by their own members [correction: not Michigan] and didn’t come close in what had been presumed to be razor-thin races. One could have made that argument about the 2012 election, in which voters left the status quo in place. Clearly, though, voters got tired of Democrats, and not just because of their politics.

The Daily Beast has learned that in the crucial swing states of Iowa, North Carolina, and Colorado, the DSCC made a decision in September to put an increased emphasis on persuasion, talking undecided voters into supporting Democratic candidates rather than turning out its base voters. In other words, instead of going after the type of people who reliably vote Democrat but don’t reliably show up on Election Day, they focused on voters who were somewhat more likely to vote but hadn’t firmly made up their minds

These undecided, persuadable voters were identified via a computer model that ranked and ordered voters as targets of persuasion not just through volunteer contact but through direct-mail paid media as well. The problem was that, at least in Iowa, this model was imperfect.

According to information obtained by The Daily Beast, the universe of persuasion targets in the Hawkeye State according to this model included 33 percent Republicans and 50 percent independents. These voters were contacted by volunteers and received at least 10 different pieces of direct mail in addition to whatever television and radio advertisements they saw or listened to. Initial data indicate that more than 60 percent of voters in this group who actually turned out on Election Day supported Republican candidates.

This was compounded by making overly optimistic assumptions about independent voters who had signed up for absentee ballots in Iowa. Internal Democratic estimates projected that Bruce Braley, the losing Senate candidate in Iowa, would have a lead of roughly 28,000 votes going into Election Day based on absentee ballots. Instead, he only won early voters by 18,000 votes. This difference: Braley was projected internally to be getting support from 65 percent of independents who voted early; he ended up much closer to 50 percent.

I don’t mean to dismiss Ben Jacobs, whose report is detailed and is worth reading, but the premise doesn’t much pass the smell test. Both parties in Iowa know how to turn out their base, and Iowa voters tend to be politically active anyway. Braley was a lousy candidate who alienated Iowa voters, and sixth-year midterms are almost always heavily influenced by national trends. If the Iowa Democratic base really needed that much goosing to avoid an 8-point drubbing from Joni Ernst, then the election was a lost cause regardless of what computer model they put into use.

The full Face the Nation interview with Obama is here:

Update: I erred in saying that Democrats lost every open Senate seat vacated by their own party. They easily hung onto Michigan, which was vacated by the retirement of Carl Levin. I’ve corrected it above.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/10/obama-ok-yeah-we-got-beat-on-tuesday/feed/822078399Open thread: Sunday morning talking headshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/09/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-151/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/09/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-151/#commentsSun, 09 Nov 2014 13:01:10 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2055931Fun TV this morning as the talk shows try to manage their Sunday-morning red-wave hangovers. The star guest on “Meet the Press”: Scott Walker, of course, who’ll explain how he’s beaten the left three times in four years in a blue state and what it feels like to suddenly be a top-tier presidential contender. Bookending the hour on MTP is an interview with … Eric Cantor, whose political fortunes at the moment are basically the precise opposite of Walker’s. In fact, fate has turned against Cantor so completely that even a rare Republican loss on Tuesday night has blocked one of his more plausible paths back to elected office. If not for Ed Gillespie’s near-upset of Mark Warner, Cantor would have been in the mix as a potential GOP nominee for governor of Virginia in a few years. Now that nomination will almost certainly go to Gillespie. Poor Eric will have to console himself with the millions he’ll make in the private sector.

If that doesn’t grab you, “Fox News Sunday” will have interviews with new Republican senators Cory Gardner and Shelley Moore Capito. And if you can take another 15 minutes of Obama, “Face the Nation” will celebrate its 60th anniversary by chatting with him and (separately) George W. Bush. That may be the only clue we get this morning about the state of play for O’s looming executive amnesty. The full line-up is at the AP.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/09/open-thread-sunday-morning-talking-heads-151/feed/962055931Quotes of the dayhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/08/quotes-of-the-day-1905/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/08/quotes-of-the-day-1905/#commentsSun, 09 Nov 2014 01:31:54 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2056300West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin told TIME Thursday that President Barack Obama has lost his emotional connection with the American people.

“There’s an old saying my grandmother would say, people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care,” he said in a phone interview. “And the President is bright and very articulate and speaks very well. People just don’t believe he cares. That’s the disconnect that I’m seeing.”

The results were not a referendum on the GOP as much as they were a repudiation of Washington, the two-party system, status-quo politics, and Obama himself. Rather than face the latter verdict, Obama seized the former and said, “The most important thing I can do is get stuff done.”

That would be nice, but how are things going to get done with no changes at the White House? Obama suggested that because the House and Senate are now controlled by a single party, Republicans might be emboldened to pass legislation he deems worthy. He said he is open to hearing what the GOP offers in the way of potential compromises—then quickly added, “Now, that isn’t a change.”

Right—no change at all, which makes me wonder whether he was listening.

***

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans. It’s not as if he has a long, distinguished record of passing legislation in a mixed environment. His later years in the Illinois State Senate enjoyed a solid Democratic majority, and he jumped into the U.S. Senate at a propitious time. Soon after he arrived came the wave of 2006, when Democrats controlled both houses of congress by comfortable margins, and Senator Obama was far too junior to be negotiating with the White House. Then came the financial crisis, and another wave, and Obama spent the first two years of his presidency in a happy situation where he could get things done without needing the support of the opposition. He didn’t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House…

It’s a little late in the president’s career to learn the fine art of making deals with people who fundamentally disagree with you, but might be willing to work on whatever small goals you might share. I suspect it feels more comfortable to go along with the strategy that has worked decently well over the last four years: hold your ground, complain about Republican intransigence, and hope that Republican legislators give you another opportunity to play long-suffering adult in the room.

***

You’ll notice that none of these nuggets gets us into the psyche of the Stranger in Chief. Mr. Todd does offer up some tantalizing thoughts on the subject. He tells us that Mr. Obama’s former colleagues in the Senate believe that things had always come too easily for the one-term Illinois senator—and that for this reason they prefer to deal with Vice President Joe Biden , a war-scarred politico who can “actually understand their frustrations.” (The most revealing passages in “The Stranger” concern Mr. Obama’s more transparent vice president, whose affability is so reflexive that when the White House patched him into the phone of a different senator than the one he intended to speak with, he simply made a new friend. Mr. Biden, Mr. Todd reports, finds his boss to be thin-skinned.) On the House side, the author observes that Mr. Obama’s relationship with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suffered because he “had few ties to Pelosi”—which of course raises the question: Then why didn’t the nation’s top Democrat set out to develop some ties?…

To that nagging question about how someone so intellectually advanced could be so politically stunted, the author’s final answer is that Barack Obama’s “arrogance got the better of him.” As a novel twist on this familiar theme, Mr. Todd theorizes that Mr. Obama’s happy experience as editor of the Harvard Law Review “gave him a false self-confidence that burns in him—and burns him—to this day.” At the same time, the author seems to be suggesting that where Mr. Obama’s cockiness ends an overabundance of caution takes over—especially true when dealing with any issue like guns, gays or race that might offend working-class voters. In such instances, Mr. Todd reports that Mr. Obama insists to the fretful idealists in his administration, “I’m enough change.” This rather remarkable assertion by our first black president comes off as simultaneously haughty and defensive. It may also be entirely accurate.

***

A Democratic Party that rode the Obama wave to historic congressional majorities is now saddled with a president who was the hot new thing six years ago. Its agenda tends to be picayune or pointless, and its new generation of leadership is the same as the old generation of leadership.

As much as an indictment of President Barack Obama’s governance, the midterms were a commentary on the exhaustion of the Democrats in the late Obama years.

Obama gives every impression of believing if he had been given the opportunity to barnstorm around the country giving the same speech outlining the same laundry list of old chestnuts — the minimum wage, green energy, infrastructure — it might have turned out differently…

We know Barack Obama is good at least one thing: getting Barack Obama elected president of the United States. How good he is at being president of the United States is a subject of considerable debate. A less debatable proposition: He is just plain awful at running a political party…

In Tuesday’s wake, any talk of an Obama-fueled realignment seems delusional. Young voters have soured on the president. Hispanics didn’t show up. Contrary to a lot of spinning early on Election Night, this wasn’t an “anti-incumbent wave”; it was an anti-Democratic, or more properly, an anti-Obama wave. The GOP captured Senate seats in Iowa and Colorado, each of which voted for Obama twice. The governor’s race in deep-blue Maryland, where Obama campaigned, went to the Republican, as did Obama’s home state of Illinois and liberal Massachusetts. Incumbent Republicans triumphed almost everywhere, while incumbent Democrats lost almost everywhere.

When the next Senate convenes, 25 more Democrats who voted for Obamacare will be gone, and the GOP’s majority in the House will be so big and solid that NBC’s Chuck Todd says Democrats won’t be able to recapture it until at least 2022.

But Obama is still the president, which is apparently all he ever cared about.

***

Democratic territory has been reduced to the bastions of two core groups — black voters and gentry liberals. Democrats win New York City and the San Francisco Bay area by overwhelming margins but are outvoted in almost all the territory in between — including, this year, Obama’s Illinois. Governor Jerry Brown ran well behind in California’s Central Valley, and Governor Andrew Cuomo lost most of upstate New York.

Democratic margins have shrunk among Hispanics and, almost to the vanishing point, among young voters. Liberal Democrats raised money to “turn Texas blue.” But it voted Republican by wider-than-usual margins this year.

For Obama, there have been two convincing presidential victories; for the Democratic Party, electoral ruin at every other level. On Tuesday (assuming the most likely final outcome), the largest Democratic Senate losses since 1980. The ranks of moderate Democrats — including Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, Kay Hagan and (probably) Mary Landrieu — decimated. During Obama’s presidency, the loss of nearly 70 House seats, producing the largest Republican majority since 1931. The near-extinction of the Democratic Party in the South, including in Arkansas and Tennessee, which provided the party’s national ticket in 1992 and 1996. Full Republican control of 29 state legislatures, the highest total since the 1920s, and Republican governors in 32 states, including Massachusetts, Illinois and Maryland…

To be a national party, Democrats need to contend for rural and small-town voters, for older voters, for working-class white voters, for white Catholics, even for suburban evangelicals. This requires not just a populist economic message (which is important) but the recognition of a set of values — a predisposition toward social order, family and faith — that is foreign to most liberal bloggers and Democratic strategists…

It is possible for progressives to admire Obama for his courage — in passing Obamacare on a party line, in insisting that Catholic institutions facilitate contraceptive coverage, now in promising an executive “amnesty” before the end of the year. He is a leader intent on shaping events, while almost entirely (on recent evidence) unshaped by them. Some will applaud.

But it is impossible to make the case that Obama has been an inclusive or unifying leader. He has left his party more ideologically and geographically uniform. He has left a riven society and political culture. And these should also be counted as Obama’s gifts.

***

In 2014, the Clintons couldn’t stop the bleeding. Republicans won the white working class by 30 points. And it will be difficult for Hillary Clinton to reduce this deficit over the next two years.

That is because of her problematic position as heir apparent to an unpopular incumbent. Her recent talk of businesses and corporations not creating jobs illustrates the dilemma: She has to identify herself with her husband’s legacy in Elizabeth Warren’s left-wing Democratic Party, while dissociating herself with the repudiated policies of the president she served as secretary of State. Has Clinton ever demonstrated the political skill necessary to pull off such a trick?…

The McCain-Clinton comparison is worth considering. Both would be among the oldest presidents in American history. Both are slightly at odds with their party: McCain on campaign finance and immigration, Clinton on corporatism and foreign policy. Both lost the nomination to the presidents they sought to replace. Both campaigned for rare third consecutive presidential terms for their parties in the cycle after those parties lost Congress…

Essentially, our last three presidents were all elected on the vague premise that they were alien beings in entrenched Washington and would reform the way things worked there, principally by transcending partisan and ideological divides. In each case, the new president, running headlong into strident opposition on one side and unreasonable expectations on the other, soon enough became a symbol of the same old partisan divide against which he had campaigned.

By the time each man ran for re-election, he had all but abandoned any grand notions of reform — whether by choice or not — in favor of a more traditional, less ennobling kind of political calculus. None of the three were able to achieve anything significant in their second terms and, in fact, could point only to big legislation passed in the first quarter of their presidencies…

For 20-plus years now, spanning these last three presidencies, we have lived with what has often been called the “permanent campaign.” What that means, essentially, is that our leaders are perpetually running for office and thinking about how to run for office, even in years when they aren’t actually running for anything, but they don’t spend a fraction of that time strategizing about how they will govern differently and effectively. They maintain armies of celebrity sloganeers and organizers, but if you can name a single policy director in any of our last presidential campaigns, you’re way ahead of most political pros…

[H]ere’s what the country could stand to avoid: a fourth straight president who glides into office with solid majorities and big imagery, and who leaves town, eight years later, having merely managed to survive.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/08/quotes-of-the-day-1905/feed/5592056300Democratic domination of coal country over?http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/08/democratic-domination-of-coal-country-over/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/08/democratic-domination-of-coal-country-over/#commentsSat, 08 Nov 2014 21:01:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2057198It sure seems that way to Politico after the midterm elections. The writing has been on the wall since the Democratic Party nominated and elected a President who declared that his energy policies would “bankrupt” coal operators in a 2008 interview, but the cycle didn’t complete itself until after Barack Obama’s EPA began to pursue those policies in earnest. What used to be the heart of Democratic working-class union strength has now flipped entirely red, and probably permanently:

The Republicans’ romp this week may have permanently turned coal country from blue to red.

Coal-heavy districts in West Virginia, Kentucky and Illinois that had been steadily moving away from Democrats in recent elections appear to have completed that shift Tuesday, when they overwhelmingly backed Republicans who vowed to oppose what they call President Barack Obama’s “war on coal.” …

In West Virginia, once a long-time Democratic stronghold, Republicans will take control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1931. Republicans picked up seven seats in the state Senate to bring the balance to 17-17, and then Democrat Daniel Hall switched parties Wednesday to give the majority to the GOP.

Voters there also elected Rep. Shelley Moore Capito as their first GOP senator in 56 years, and Republicans won three congressional contests, even kicking out 38-year incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall.

Coal was only one issue for voters, who also cited the economy and Obamacare as reasons for ditching the Democrats in the midterms. But with EPA moving ahead on rules to limit greenhouse gases from power plants, and its past pollution regulations helping push dozens of old coal-fired power plants into retirement, candidates who line up with the president became a tough sell in areas that have few other industries outside the shrinking coal-mining sector.

Democrats did manage to win in Pennsylvania, unseating unpopular Republican Tom Corbett in a 10-point walk, but that’s more of an anomaly. Republicans won 13 out of 18 House districts in the Keystone State, making the state look like this:

In the House of Representatives map, coal country now looks like this (pickups shown in light pink):

The problem for Democrats won’t just be with coal, either. Natural gas is an emerging energy source that could provide much cleaner conversion, and has abundant resources for the next century or more at today’s known holdings. However, fracking will be necessary to extract it, and Obama’s EPA has made it clear that they will be hostile to that technology as well. The fracking map goes beyond the coal-country map, which means that Democratic attempts to squelch that industry will have a wider impact than Obama’s war on coal.

It will have a longer-lasting impact, too. Democrats tell Politico’s Erica Martinson that they think they’ll have a chance to woo back coal-country voters after Obama leaves office, but it’s no secret that Democrats have backed efforts to curtail fracking and shut down efforts to extract that natural gas that could provide coal country another lease on economic life, as well as other areas outside of the traditional coal-producing region. The EPA’s attacks on fracking now will have echoes for years, perhaps decades, in this very same region and beyond. As the campaign of Alison Lundergan Grimes showed in losing by 15 points, merely paying lip service to coal miners won’t be sufficient for Democrats who keep playing footsie with the environmental extremists that want to put these voters and their families out of work and out of options.

If Democrats want to win elections in this region, they have to stop killing its primary industries. In the words of James Carville, it’s the economy, stupid.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/08/democratic-domination-of-coal-country-over/feed/522057198WaPo factchecks Obama on ObamaCare, election message in post-midterm presserhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/wapo-factchecks-obama-on-obamacare-election-message-in-post-midterm-presser/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/wapo-factchecks-obama-on-obamacare-election-message-in-post-midterm-presser/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 23:41:40 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2041607This hasn’t exactly been a banner week for Democrats, but especially so for Barack Obama. The Washington Post corrected him twice this week on claims made by the President’s denial of reality in his post-election press conference, the first time in a formal fact-check from Glenn Kessler. Obama tried arguing that the election results didn’t really reflect on ObamaCare despite the success of Republicans in defeating Democrats who supported it — or even those who refused to answer the question — because ObamaCare has reduced the costs of health care in every year since its passage. That assumes facts not in evidence in terms of causal relationship, Kessler notes, and isn’t true on the facts anyway:

In fact, despite the president’s claim of a decrease of every year, the White House’s own chart shows that the 2013 estimate represents a slight uptick from 2012, when adjusted for inflation and population. As the White House report puts it, “the three years since 2010 will have recorded the three slowest health-care spending growth rates since record keeping began in 1960.” That is impressive, but it is not the same as health costs going down “every single year” since the law was passed in 2010. …

There is no dispute that health care spending is growing at its lowest level since the 1960s, but the impact of the Affordable Care Act is still uncertain. The White House has issued reports making its case, which have beendisputed by others. There are certainly some cost-controls contained in the law, but it remains unclear whether those measures have really had that much impact, especially because the Great Recession clearly had affected health-care inflation even before the law was implemented. Just as growth in health-care costs have slowed because the 2009 economic crisis, so has economic growth and general price inflation overall.

When making a claim like this, the president needs to get his statistics right. He is trying to say that Obamacare is responsible for the slowdown in health-care costs, without directly saying so. But he should acknowledge that although the overall trend is positive, the impact of his health-care law remains unclear. Uttering this claim without any caveats is going too far, even when making allowances for the fact he is speaking extemporaneously. The president earns Three Pinocchios.

It’s not the first Pinocchios Obama has earned from ObamaCare. He got saddled with the Lie of the Year in 2013 from Politifact, after the rollout of the program demonstrated that millions of people could not in fact keep their plans if they liked them. Kessler has handed them out repeatedly to Obama and Democrats on this issue. These are just since the rollout last October:

April 2014: Two Pinocchios for claiming that opponents spent “billions” fighting ObamaCare

February 2014: Four Pinocchios for claiming that 7 million people got covered because of the Medicaid expansion

Also February 2014: Dick Durbin gets four for asserting that 10 million people got coverage

January 2014: Both Obama and Kessler himself got three Pinocchios for similar claims on Medicaid expansion

November 2013: Three for blaming insurance companies for plan cancellations rather than the plan standards forced on them by ObamaCare

October 2013: Four for “you can keep your plan,” once it became clear millions couldn’t

These were just the Kessler fact-checks that we’ve noted, and it comes to 23 Pinocchios in 13 months. Obama doesn’t exactly have a track record of honesty when it comes to the central policy of his administration, in other words. That had something to do with the results of the midterms, where voters sent Democrats packing on every level of government they could. Obama tried denying this, but Chris Cillizza says come on, man:

“There’s no doubt that the Republicans had a good night,” he conceded, before pivoting to note that the message voters were sending had nothing to do with him but, rather, was about wanting politicians to get things done.

Except that Obama had said repeatedly during the runup to the vote that his policies were very much part of the election. “Make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot,” he said at Northwestern University in early October. “Every single one of them.”

You don’t get to have it both ways — taking the credit if your side wins and shirking the blame if it loses. Obama said Wednesday that he wouldn’t “read the tea leaves” of the 2014 elections. Of course, he was more than willing to read those same leaves after his 2012 reelection.

Losing elections is one thing. It happens to almost all politicians if they stay in the game long enough. Refusing to shoulder any of the blame for that loss is something else entirely.

President Obama, for forgetting that you are the head of your party, in good times and bad, you had the worst week in Washington.

Cillizza is wrong about one thing. In terms of Obama’s honesty, this attempt to have it both ways isn’t “something else entirely” — it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from Obama.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/wapo-factchecks-obama-on-obamacare-election-message-in-post-midterm-presser/feed/612041607James Pethokoukis, solider, fights lonely battle against everyone on CNBChttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/james-pethokoukis-solider-fights-lonely-battle-against-everyone-on-cnbc/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/james-pethokoukis-solider-fights-lonely-battle-against-everyone-on-cnbc/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 23:01:06 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2043601American Enterprise Institute scholar James Pethokoukis is a man of infinite patience. The depth of his tolerance was perhaps most convincingly demonstrated in a Wednesday appearance on CNBC’s Closing Bell. There, Pethokoukis bravely confronted guests and hosts alike in a selfless effort to combat the liberal premises with which he was bombarded.

CNBC, an economics network, invited the editor of the Putin-loving far-left magazine The Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel, to discuss the outcome of the 2014 midterms and their impact on economic issues. Vanden Heuvel’s spin on the midterms was not surprising, but the way in which the rest of the panel of guests rushed to agree with her was.

One of the panel guests could not determine a single mandate emerging from this election, save for a ringing public endorsement for increasing the minimum wage. Another painted a Dickensian portrait of the electorate and noted that she “confronted” those who were so apathetic about the state of American politics that they refused to vote.

“Maybe the thing is they do want a higher minimum wage and, gosh, maybe they do like more pre-school funding, but they do not think that either of those things is enough to shake us off of this new normal,” Pethokoukis observed.

For a panel of economic experts, it’s shocking that it took the only conservative to note that universal pre-k and a $1.20 minimum wage hike are quite unlikely to get the American economic engine revving again. Moreover, how is it possible that only Pethokoukis noticed that the electorate that voted in favor of ballot initiatives that hike minimum wage soundly rejected politicians who promised to pursue similar policies at a federal level? It is simply condescending to presume the voters did not know what they were doing when they pulled the lever for Republicans in droves, but that seems to be the underlying assumption from three out of these four panelists.

Pethokoukis did not spend his time on this panel defending Republican policies. In fact, he made a point of noting that the present Republican agenda is an inadequate response to the scope of the challenges ahead of the country. But he was an island in a sea of laughably weak attempts to rescue Democrats from the voters’ wrath.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/james-pethokoukis-solider-fights-lonely-battle-against-everyone-on-cnbc/feed/692043601Video: Gillespie concedes in VA Senate racehttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/video-gillespie-concedes-in-va-senate-race/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/video-gillespie-concedes-in-va-senate-race/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 21:01:29 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2043910And so one of the biggest surprise story lines of the midterm election comes to an end — at least for now. Before Tuesday, analysts thought Republicans had an outside shot at winning a narrow Senate majority, and Ed Gillespie had an outside shot of becoming starting QB for the Washington Redskins. Instead, incumbent Mark Warner came within less than 20,000 votes of losing what everyone thought would be a sure re-election bid, barely eking out the win against the former RNC chair. Gillespie decided to forgo a recount, even though the option was still open to him, and conceded the race this afternoon instead:

Gillespie said at a Friday afternoon news conference that he had called Warner “congratulating him on his re-election” in a race that turned out to be one of the midterm election’s biggest surprises.

Polls had shown Warner, a popular former governor who’d been endorsed by his Republican predecessor, ex-Sen. John Warner, with a hefty lead. But Gillespie led Warner for much of the night as returns trickled in Tuesday — and ultimately ended up trailing by less than one percentage point.

Gillespie had declined to concede until after a recanvass took place, a review of the ballot-count reports and recalculation of the Election Night results. With the race within a percentage point, Gillespie could have called for a full recount, which would have taken several more days, but knew that recounts don’t generate results that reverse 17,000-vote differences. Rather than put the state through a divisive process for the infinitesimal chance it might change the outcome, Gillespie decided enough was enough:

“I’ve called Mark Warner to congratulate him on his reelection,” Gillespie said in a Friday press conference in Northern Virginia. “It would be wrong to put my fellow Virginiains through a recount when in my head and in my heart, I know a change in the outcome is not possible.” …

Gillespie stayed upbeat throughout the speech, thanking his staff and advisors one by one. But at the end, his voice cracked as he thanked his family.

“It would have been nice to be called senator but the best thing I’ve ever been called is dad,” he said before hugging his family and some supporters on his way out the door.

The classy exit after a narrow but confirmed loss will serve Gillespie well in the future. A week or two ago, few would have expected Gillespie to have a future in Virginia politics. The big question was whether he could avoid a double-digit humiliation. Mark Warner was expected to crush Gillespie, but instead the Republican nearly shocked Virginia as much as Larry Hogan shocked next-door Maryland in the gubernatorial race. Gillespie’s surprising finish and his clearly positive standing in Virginia will make him the obvious choice to challenge for the gubernatorial race in 2017. Terry McAuliffe is term-limited anyway, but after four years of his leadership Virginians will certainly be ready for a change of pace.

Consider for a moment what this means for Mark Warner, too. As a former governor and Senator, Warner could have made an argument for being the alternative to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Had he won an easy re-election in a Democrat-friendly state like Virginia, Warner might have given Democrats a credible and moderate alternative to the woman whose public campaigning keeps backfiring on her own ambitions. An outright loss would have ended any such ambitions, obviously, but this near-miss doesn’t do much for Warner’s credibility as a candidate outside of his home state … or inside of it, either.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/07/video-gillespie-concedes-in-va-senate-race/feed/572043910Anti-megadonor super-PAC, megadonors, and Democrats learn same lesson in midtermshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/06/anti-megadonor-super-pac-megadonors-and-democrats-learn-same-in-midterms/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/06/anti-megadonor-super-pac-megadonors-and-democrats-learn-same-in-midterms/#commentsThu, 06 Nov 2014 22:21:07 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=2023405One clear lesson has emerged from this midterm election — voters do not respond to lectures. That’s true whether it’s about climate change, the ridiculous “war on women” meme, Kochsteria, or anything else that activists think they can make a centerpiece of an election. Unfortunately for some, that became a very expensive lesson — even for those trying to make expensive lessons a lesson in themselves:

Embracing the irony of setting up a super PAC that would spend big money in order to fight super PACs and other groups that spend big money, Harvard professor Larry Lessig and GOP strategist Mark McKinnon went all-in on the idea voters would kick megadonors to the curb.

Tuesday, voters shrugged and cast their ballots for business as usual, leaving Mayday and Lessig — who emerged as its public personae — facing questions about the disconnect between its bold predictions and results.

Mayday PAC burst onto the political scene in the spring of 2014 with grandiose designs to elect a pro-campaign finance reform majority to the U.S. Congress by 2016. The 2014 cycle was a test run of sorts — with the group spending more than $10 million on a slate of candidates ostensibly united only in their belief in curbing the influence of big donors, lobbyists and money in the political system.

It was money down the drain.

Senate hopefuls Rick Weiland and Greg Orman and House candidates Paul Clements, Staci Appel and Rep. Carol Shea-Porter — all lost, despite Mayday’s much-touted, high-profile investments in those races. The setbacks across the country on Tuesday follow on the heels of a loss in the New Hampshire primary, when Mayday PAC backed a losing GOP challenger to Scott Brown. In the only race where Mayday PAC backed a winner — supporting Republican Rep. Walter Jones’ in North Carolina — it was hard-pressed to claim credit, since Jones’ reelection to a safe GOP seat was all-but assured without outside help.

And instead of getting one step closer to a pro-campaign finance reform majority, voters on Tuesday elected enough Senate Republican to handover control of the Senate to Republican Mitch McConnell — perhaps the leading opponent of Mayday’s vision. McConnell has long opposed campaign money restrictions as infringements on free speech and impediments to the free exchange of ideas.

Why did this fail? In large part, because only a relatively small number of people worry about the impact of big money in elections to the exclusion of everything else. The waste of money and resources left Lessig and McKinnon with enough egg on their faces that Lessig uncharacteristically has declined to engage with the media since the election results made the scope of his failure clear.

The same can be said about Tom Steyer, the Democratic megadonor who plowed $57 million of his own cash (some estimates range as high as $74 million) into the midterms in an attempt to make climate change a central campaign issue. Slate pointed out on Election Eve that Steyer, and not the oft-demonized Koch brothers, was the biggest outside spender in the race, and ended up with a marginalized issue and very little in results:

This election cycle’s biggest spender—at least among those who operate through the fully disclosed part of the political system, a.k.a. not the Koch brothers—is liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who doled out at least $57 million of his own cash to try to get voters to care about climate change. The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), an environmental group, dumped another $25 million this year into the 2014 races, about $5 million more than it spent in 2010 and 2012 combined. All told, environmentalist organizations say they’ll pour $85 million into the midterms. As LCV president Gene Karpinski declared proudly to the Washington Post late last month, “This is by far the biggest investment that the environmental community has ever made in politics.”

What has all that green gotten these green groups? Not a whole heck of a lot.

Steyer and his like-minded allies opened their checkbooks with the hopes of making climate change a front-burner issue. But as the most expensivemidterm election in American history wraps up, it’s clear that environmentalists will fall far short of that goal. A Pew Research Center poll from September found that the environment came in a distant eighth among a list of 11 campaign issues that matter most to voters.

Former hedge fund trader Tom Steyer became a billionaire by making brilliant investments. But his political investments mostly went belly-up Tuesday, a fate his critics were quick to attribute to noveau riche mistakes in his first big foray in the national money game. …

“He and his team are probably going to have to take a step back and rethink this,” said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “The fact of the matter is this election wasn’t and never was going to be about climate change.”

Asked how Steyer had performed this cycle, one prominent Democratic donor said, “In a word: badly.”

Michael Bloomberg spent more than $20 million in this cycle, all but $500,000 on Democrats and liberal causes. How many gun-control advocates won election to the House or Senate on Tuesday night? In gubernatorial races? To state legislatures, which went more Republican than they have been in decades?

This lesson didn’t just get taught to outside groups and activists, either. Democrats tried making the midterms about contraception and abortion, and in Colorado’s Senate race, almost exclusively so. Women, as it turns out, had other issues in mind and didn’t care to be patronized, as I point out in an I told you so column in The Fiscal Times:

The results of the election also demonstrated the intellectual and political failure of Democratic strategy in the midterm elections, especially on the so-called “war on women.” My column last week predicted that Colorado’s Senate race would be the Waterloo for this particular demagoguery, and the results speak clearly for themselves. Incumbent Democrat Mark Udall got heckled by a major Democratic donor at a campaign stop two days before the election, for obsessing over contraception and abortion. “Who is running the worst campaign? Him,” Leo Beserra later explained, “because [expletive] abortion is all he talks about.”

How well did that work out for Udall? He lost his seat by 80,000 votes to Cory Gardner in an election where fellow Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper managed to eke out a re-election victory by 26,000 votes. Udall ended up winning among women who voted by nine points, but lost men by 16 points – and women only made up 48 percent of the Colorado electorate, their worst showing in 22 years. The “war on women” meme didn’t boost turnout, and in fact may have depressed turnout with its rank paternalism, especially in the infamous “Sweet Pea” ad sponsored by NARAL and funded by climate change activist Tom Steyer.

The war on women backfired on Democratic women running for office, too. In Texas, Wendy Davis’ entire oeuvre revolved around her filibuster against a highly popular late-term abortion ban. Few expected her to compete against Greg Abbott, but no one expected her to lose among women by nine points, 54/45, while losing two-thirds of male voters.

In Kentucky, where Democrats hoped to use the “war on women” strategy against Mitch McConnell to woo women and younger voters, Alison Lundergan Grimes ended up narrowly losing the female vote, 47/50 and in a virtual tie with McConnell among 18-29-year-olds at 48/47. Nationally, women only gave Democrats a five-point edge in midterm voting, far short of the double-digit gender gap they expected.

There isn’t really much mystery to this. Poll after poll showed that the issues that voters had most on their minds were the economy, government operation, jobs, and the deficit. Gallup’s analysis showed that climate change and contraception were among the “bottom five” issues in the midterms, and gun control and “big money in elections” didn’t even make it onto the list. They were even in the bottom five among Democrats. Income inequality also ranked as a second-tier issue.

The difference in the election is easily understood. Republicans talked about the issues that interested voters the most. Democrats conducted a months-long lecture series to tell voters what they should care about most. The midterms show how well that strategy worked, and demonstrated that money isn’t actually the deciding factor in elections at all. If Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton to lecture everyone on the “war on women” or Elizabeth Warren to scold voters about income inequality in 2016, they will learn an even harder lesson.